Restitution (15 page)
“We've done it, Karl,” Marie added. “Now we can really start our new lives in Canada.”
Karl could hardly believe what he was hearing. After all the months of uncertainty and waiting, could it really be that they had passed every hurdle and were going to be able to get out of Europe at last? They barely spoke to one another on the journey back to Paris. Despite the dire predictions, the city had not been bombed. However, like cities across Europe, it lay in anxious expectation of what would happen in the days and weeks to come. Each member of Karl's family was lost in private thoughts.
Would the papers really be ready
, Karl wondered,
or would the family be subjected to a new series of questions, forms, and tests?
Would they finally be able to leave for the safety of Canada, or would they find themselves imprisoned in a Europe destined for war?
When Karl and Victor entered the building of the Canadian consulate, they were ushered into the office of the same indifferent administrator. This time, he rose from behind his cluttered desk and extended his hand to Victor. “Here are all the documents required to enter Canada as permanent immigrants, Mr. Reiser,” the man said. He handed the papers over to Victor. On top, Karl couldn't help but notice that Victor's passport had been altered slightly. Next to the line that asked for occupation, the consulate official had scratched out the word “businessman” and replaced it with the handwritten words “agricultural estate owner.” “Good luck to you and your family,” the official said.
Victor's eyes shone brightly and he stood a little straighter as he left the building clutching the visas to Canada. With the papers in hand, there was only one more thing left for Victor to do and that was to book passage on a ship sailing for Quebec City. With the world on the brink of war, Europe was filled with panicky North Americans scrambling to get home. There were long line-ups at the booking offices in Paris, where anxious would-be passengers pushed and shoved to get to the front. Fortunately for Karl and his family, George Harwood had come through for them again. While many others would be stranded in Europe, four tickets were waiting for the Reisers on the Canadian Pacific steamer
Empress of Britain
, which was due to sail from France on September 1.
This would be the last commercial voyage of this vessel before it was converted into a warship. A year later, it would be torpedoed and sunk by a German long-range bomber. The Reisers had no notion of the future fate of this liner as Victor happily paid for the tickets, and Karl and his family packed their bags one last time and boarded a train for the port city of Cherbourg.
The sun reflected off the gleaming white hull of the steamer as Karl stood on the deck, leaning over the railing and marveling at the crowd that had gathered on the pier to bid farewell to the travelers. More than one thousand passengers were on board, and these people would become his shipmates for the six-day journey across the ocean. People stood on either side of him, cheering and waving to friends, family, and even strangers on shore who waved in return. Pretty soon Karl found himself caught up in the fervor of the crowd and began to wave as well. His heart was pounding and his skin burned with feverish expectation. Ahead lay the vastness of the open sea and an unfamiliar country, a country that he was already beginning to call his new home. The horn blasted, the engine droned, and the anchor was cranked aboard as the
Empress of Britain
slipped its moorings and slowly moved out of the French harbor.
On that very day, German troops invaded Poland. Two days later, on September 3, Britain declared war on Germany for its unprovoked attack on Poland, and, a few hours later, France followed. At 11:15 a.m. that same day, Prime Minster Neville Chamberlain gave a speech to his nation and said, “It is evil things that we shall be fighting against â brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression, and persecution â [but] against them I am certain that right will prevail.”
5
On September 7, 1939, with war descending like a shroud over the world, the SS
Empress of Britain
docked in Quebec City and Karl and his family disembarked in their new home.
Toronto, June 1943
THE SMALL CLOCK next to his bed read twenty minutes to seven. Karl checked himself again in the mirror and adjusted his tie. If he didn't hurry up he'd be late to the meeting, and he didn't like arriving after everyone else. The New World Club, which was organized by a Czech couple, George and Edith Moller, met one evening a month at a small hall on Charles Street. The Mollers had formed this club with the aim of bringing young Czech people together for social events. Several marriages had resulted from introductions there. Karl had been attending for some time.
The club was a friendly reminder of home, the part of home that he still thought about. There were many things about Czechoslovakia that Karl did not miss. His former country had turned its back on him in so many ways â disregarding his loyalty and casting his family out at the start of the war. But he did miss his house and the lifestyle that he and his family had once had. He glanced around his present living quarters, a sparsely furnished bedroom in a small rooming house. Gone were the expensive furnishings, artwork, and lavish existence. Karl shook his head and shrugged off the moment of nostalgia. There was nothing here that he lacked. In fact, he and his family had done quite well for themselves since their arrival four years earlier.
They had been dazed at first. Who could blame them? As relieved as each member of the family was to be out of war-torn Europe, Canada was unfamiliar territory, filled with strangers, unusual customs, and words that fell on their ears like dissonant musical chords. Notwithstanding Karl's English lessons, it was difficult to grasp the nuances and subtleties of this foreign language, not to mention the customs and practices of Canadians. In those early days, Karl spent hours wandering city streets, staring at passers-by and trying to absorb as much of Canadian life as he could. He tasted Canadian food, enjoying his first hamburger and Coca-Cola.
Their first stop after arriving in Quebec City had been Montreal. But they did not remain there for long. Victor had other plans for the family, and so they packed up once more and headed for Toronto. Their initial stay in the center of this big city was also brief, crammed into one small room at the St. Regis Hotel on Sherbourne Street, north of Carlton. A drop curtain that divided the room in two was the only means to secure some privacy. Victor made contact with other Czech acquaintances, and learned that many of his fellow refugees had settled on farms near the city of Hamilton, roughly sixty miles west of Toronto. He decided to do the same. Under the rules of his entry into Canada, Victor was required to develop a farming business. If he could do that within a Czech community, he reasoned, that would make the adjustment that much easier.
In Hamilton, the family was met by a friend from Czechoslovakia whose name was Arthur Brock. Arthur had arrived months earlier and already was a wealth of information about where to stay and what to do. Karl had a distinct and fond childhood memory of Arthur, who had owned a ceramics factory in RakovnÃk that also manufactured clay marbles. Arthur was a small, rotund, and good-natured man. Whenever he had visited Karl's family, he had come armed with marbles, gifts for Karl and Hana. Karl had had an enormous collection, all left behind in their wartime flight.
With Arthur's help, Victor made contact with a real estate agent who was known to cater to the refugee community, and began to look at various properties around the Hamilton area, eventually settling on a fifty-acre farm near the village of Carlisle.
Karl loved the farmhouse from the moment he first set foot over its threshold. It was a charming, two-story, red-brick building that had seemed instantly welcoming. Four large bedrooms on the second floor provided ample room for them. There was a big, inviting kitchen and an equally spacious parlor and dining room. The small barn in the back sheltered their livestock: four cows, two horses, and several pigs. A small coop to one side housed the chickens. This was a mixed-produce farm, producing wheat as well as dairy products.
Once they were settled in the house, Victor wrote to his former business associate in Holland, Mr. Kolish. In the weeks before fleeing RakovnÃk, Marie had sent him several cases of personal items â clothing, household objects, and delicate goods â to keep until the family was living somewhere safe. Victor requested that Mr. Kolish now send these cases to their new home in Carlisle. It was a joyful day when the boxes arrived at the Carlisle railroad station and Victor and Karl went to pick them up. Marie opened them and pulled out jackets, socks, dresses, and scarves, along with some pots, vases, and cooking utensils. There were even several small oil paintings that she had managed to pack in the crates â two works by the Czech painter Emil Orlik, and a painting by John Houston titled
Lady in Lace Dress
. Another was a canvas by Rudolf Puchold, Karl's former art teacher, depicting a scene from the courtyard of RakovnÃk's city hall. It was as if a piece of their Czech past had joined them here in Canada. But the joy the family felt at being reunited with some of their belongings from RakovnÃk was tempered by the realization that these objects could never make up for all that they had lost. There was both comfort and longing here in Carlisle.
But perhaps the most welcome thing of all was the warmth with which the community greeted the Reisers upon their arrival. In a country where the government had virtually sealed its borders to Jews escaping Europe, it was a surprise to discover how friendly the citizens were. The people of Carlisle had probably never laid eyes on refugees with European accents before. Still, they were warm and helpful in every possible way. Women would appear at the farmhouse door with baskets of baked goods and clothing for Marie. And men lent their expertise on farming techniques to Victor. Hana returned to high school in a nearby town and Karl even went so far as to join a youth group at the United Church across the road, participating in meetings, lectures, and dances.
As time passed, however, it became clear that Victor would be unable to coax a viable income from the farm. As Victor often joked, “The farm is too small to make a living, and too large to let us starve.” In fact, it was the money that Marie had transferred out to the Crédit Lyonnais in Paris years earlier that had enabled them to purchase the land and that sustained them now. Victor knew little about how to grow wheat or maintain the dairy cows, and relied heavily on a hired hand who had come with the farm and was the only one who really knew how to take care of the land and the animals.
The English language, which had been difficult at times for Karl, had been a nearly insurmountable challenge for his father, who continued to stumble his way through awkward-sounding vocabulary and grammar. On top of that, he had never fully regained his health or strength after fleeing Czechoslovakia. Not only was Victor unfamiliar with farming routines, he was completely unaccustomed to physical labor. He always looked pale and on the verge of illness. His once strong body was stooped. His face was tense and troubled, and deep furrows like dry river beds were carved into his forehead. The limp that had appeared in France was worse. Victor walked with pain and it showed throughout his aging body.
In contrast, his mother had again proven herself to be amazingly adaptable. She had moved from a life of luxury to physically and morally sustaining the family here in Canada. The demands of this rural farming lifestyle had been as grueling for Marie as for the rest of the family. But she had met every challenge head on, cooking meals for everyone including the hired help, tending to the vegetable garden, cleaning the farmhouse. She even had the responsibility of rising in the middle of the night to keep the fire in the furnace going. She had done all this and more, selflessly and without complaint. Increasingly, her time had been taken up with caring for Karl's father.
Karl shook his head at all those memories as he finished getting ready for his meeting. He took one last look in the mirror, then switched off the lamp and left his small room. It was still light outside and the lingering warmth of the early summer evening seeped through his thin jacket and into his skin. He wound through the bustling streets of Toronto. Everywhere he turned there were reminders that the war was still on. Billboards glowed from atop high-rise buildings. One read,
You Serve by Saving: Buy War Savings Certificates
. Another poster advertising wristwatches proclaimed,
Canada's Finest Deserve the Best
. Two young boys stood on a street corner calling out to the passers-by to collect their metal, paper, and other waste to be recycled for the war effort. The
Globe and Mail
newspaper regularly reported on the heroism of Canada's soldiers overseas as well as the carnage of war and the suffering in its wake. The world had become fractured, and war had metastasized across Europe like a malignant cancer.
Who could ever have imagined that the conflict would turn into an event of global impact? Once the United States declared war on Germany after the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor, more than sixty countries were involved, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers were fighting overseas.
The war news in Czechoslovakia was always of particular concern and interest to Karl. Only a month earlier, he had read of the attack on SS leader Reinhard Heydrich outside the Prague castle. On May 27, as his automobile slowed to round a sharp turn on the streets of Prague, assassins shot at him, and threw a bomb at his car. He managed to crawl from the wreckage, but died days later from the wounds. In reprisal for the murder of Heydrich, Hitler had gone on a killing spree, looting Czech villages, and hunting down and slaughtering anyone suspected of being involved in the assassination.
The reports of the war in Europe were distressing for Karl and his family, particularly the grisly news that was trickling out about the treatment of Jews. Reports were spreading that Jews in Europe were being rounded up and relocated to forced labor camps. Many were never heard from again and the speculation was growing that “forced labor” was merely a euphemism for mass murder. By the spring of 1942, Hitler had already convened the Wannsee Conference to coordinate the Final Solution, his plan to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe. The Belzec extermination camp became operational in March 1942 and Jews from across Europe were already being deported to Auschwitz and Majdanek.
