Always and Forever (3 page)

All these years later he felt sick when he remembered that strange meeting with Papa on the bridge that connected Salzburg with Germany. The Nazis had allowed Papa to continue operating his private hospital and research center—which had been his father’s before him—because of the important work on nutrition he was doing in his laboratory. A special ruling afforded him the privilege. By then, Jews had been deprived of almost all their rights. Papa had gone to Munich to deliver a paper on this research, and from there had traveled to the bridge. David broke into a cold sweat as he remembered that meeting….

His eyes crept constantly to his watch because the timing of this meeting was crucial. Papa had insisted that it was too dangerous for him to travel through Germany under present conditions. Instead, he had gone from London to Prague and then to Salzburg.

His gaze clung to the face of his watch as the time of the meeting approached. His heart pounded.
Now,
he exhorted himself. Now was the time. Walk toward the bridge. Appear to be a tourist. The Nazi frontier guards at the barbed wire must not realize he and Papa knew each other.

There he was.
How much older his father looked in the two years since they had seen each other! Papa said it was impossible to send money out of Germany anymore. This was the only way to give him funds to continue on through college and into medical school. There had never been any question in either of their minds but that he would become a doctor like his father and grandfather.

“David, you’re taller,” his father whispered as they met at the barbed wire. The Nazi guard fortunately engaged in conversation with another guard.

“Just filling out, Papa.” His eyes clung to his father’s face. “How is Mama?” Why hadn’t she come with Papa? “And my sisters? And Grandma and Grandpa?” His words tumbling over each other in his haste to communicate. Knowing this meeting must be brief.

“Take this,” his father ordered, eyes fastened on the guards, and thrust a small cloth bag through the barbed-wire fence. “Hide it quickly.”

“Yes, Papa.” He took the bag and thrust it into his pocket.

“Don’t lose it, David.”

“The family?” David asked urgently.

His father’s face was anguished.

“David, I know no easy way to tell you. Mama died five weeks ago. Her last words were of you.”

David stared at his father, trying to assimilate what had been told to him.

“Why didn’t you bring me home?” he reproached with a mixture of grief and anger. “I should have been with her!”

“Mama insisted—” his father began, then suddenly straightened up and became a stranger. “I am sorry, young man. I can’t give you a cigarette—I don’t smoke.”

“Move along,” the Nazi guard ordered ominously. “Before I decide to search you. Are you transmitting money into Austria?” he demanded in sudden suspicion.

“Who has money?” Dr. Kohn shrugged with a touch of humor, avoiding a backward glance as David moved away. “Everything costs so much today—”

Later he understood that Papa had sold off what the Nazis allowed him to keep and bought diamonds with the money. Diamonds were small and easy to transport. His father knew his cousin Julius would be able to find a buyer for the gems in New York. It was these diamonds, his family’s life savings, that would see him through college and medical school.

David had never seen his father again. The entire family had died in Bergen-Belsen. He felt again the awful pain when word had come through to him of their deaths in the gas chamber. A former patient of his father—a man who had survived Bergen-Belsen—had contacted him through one of the relief agencies just four months ago. Even while he had hoped for their survival, in his heart he had known they were gone.

The train pulled to a stop. Passengers were moving toward the exits. David waited for the others to leave. Though the limp he had acquired in a skiing accident at fifteen was barely perceptible—but sufficient to prevent his joining the American armed forces—David was ever conscious of this imperfection.

He had gone up to Greenwich for two days before sailing for Hamburg out of respect for Uncle Julius and Aunt Bella; they were actually his cousins, but he had been told to regard them as his uncle and aunt. School holidays and summer vacations had been spent with them and their son and daughters. At boarding school he had shared a room with his cousin Phil. He had needed that sense of closeness these years away from home.

He was never entirely comfortable in their ornate Greenwich mansion. Uncle Julius’ taste was flamboyant compared to that of his parents. True, the Julius Kohn estate—as Uncle Julius enjoyed calling it—was only minutes from the Merritt Parkway in Round Hill, the posh back-country of Greenwich, and marvelously peaceful after his back-breaking tours of duty first as an intern, then resident at Bellevue Hospital. Julius Kohn was recognized as one of the most successful furriers in America, yet David suspected that to his neighbors he was an outsider. David doubted that any Jew—no matter how wealthy—would be anything but an outsider in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Emerging in the central area of the terminal, a valise in each hand, David paused. He had hours on his hands before boarding the ship. He would call Phil to see if he was at that little apartment he had rented for himself up on West End Avenue. Maybe they could have dinner together. Aunt Bella was upset that Phil had insisted on having a place in town for himself, but David understood. After two years fighting a war, Phil wasn’t ready to settle down in Greenwich and go into the fur business with his father.

Phil answered the phone on the second ring.

“Hello.” He sounded cautious. Expecting a reproachful call from his mother, David guessed.

“Hi, it’s me,” David said. “I’ve got some time on my hands before the ship sails. Feel like coming downtown for dinner?”

“Sure. Where are you?”

“Grand Central. Where should I—”

“I’ll pick you up at the Information Center,” Phil interrupted ebulliently. “It’s past the rush hour—I can be there in five minutes.”

They went to dinner at Toots Shor’s. Phil was restless, talking about trying to line up a job as a roving photographer.

“The old man’s still on the kick about my coming into the business.” He shuddered expressively. “Climbing into the limo with him every morning at five forty-five for the miserable drive into the city. When I got out of uniform, I swore I’d never get up before nine again.”

“You’re just out of uniform a few weeks,” David said soothingly. “He knows you need some time to adjust to civilian life again.” He felt guilty that he had never served his adopted country. He was a citizen now. He’d applied for citizenship on his 21st birthday. “Thank God for V-J Day.”

“You bet.” Phil grinned. “Two years in Europe and they had me out in Texas training for the Pacific. I got rescued just before I was to be shipped out again.” He was pensive for a moment. “You might just see me in Hamburg. I’ve got something going with a magazine. A possible photo layout on postwar Germany.”

“Great,” David approved. The last few days he’d been having reservations about setting foot on German soil again, yet his conscience told him that as a survivor, it was his personal obligation to help those displaced persons in such need. And he had to see for himself the concentration camp where his family had died. Bergen-Belsen was close enough to Hamburg for him to be able to drive there in, perhaps, an hour—provided car and gas were available. Aunt Bella said it was masochistic, but he had to know what they had endured.

“I’d kind of like to see Paris again.” Phil intruded on his introspection. “Some of those babes over there, zowie!” He whistled in appreciation. “And didn’t they just love American GIs.”

David glanced at his watch. He was hardly in the mood, he thought somberly, to be concerned about girls. This was not a vacation in Europe; there was much work to be done.

“Maybe I ought to head for the pier. The traffic can be heavy—I wouldn’t want to miss the sailing.”

Kathy stood on the deck of the ship with Rhoda Karsh—fresh out of Teachers College at Columbia but in no rush to start her teaching career—and watched the lighted torch of the Statue of Liberty disappear from view.

“My father said he didn’t believe the war was truly over until he saw the torch lighted again,” Kathy said softly.

“When I was about ten, my parents took me out to Bedloe’s Island to see the Statue of Liberty,” Rhoda remembered. “To them it was holy. They came here as kids early in the century. On the same boat, would you believe it? Of course, they didn’t find that out until they were married.”

“My Aunt Sophie was sixteen when her family came here from Berlin. She never talks about it, but she worries about cousins that stayed behind in Germany. She hasn’t heard from them in over fifty years—you know how people lose touch. It would be impossible to track them down even if they survived.”

“This must be a kind of pilgrimage for David Kohn,” Rhoda said, her voice deepening in compassion. “Somebody said his whole family died in the camps.”

“How awful for him.” She felt a sudden chill, just hearing about it. “I don’t think I could go back if something like that had happened to me.”

“Wouldn’t you think we could have gotten passage on something better than this heap?” Rhoda deliberately redirected the conversation. Soon enough, Kathy thought, they’d come face to face with the atrocities of the camps. “I didn’t expect the
Ile de France,
but this is for the birds. Four of us stuffed in a cabin big enough for one!”

“We’ll spend most of our time on deck,” said Kathy.

“I know. We’ll have classes in German every day.” Rhoda sighed. “Why didn’t I take German in college?”

“Let’s go down below and unpack,” Kathy suggested.

“I get claustrophobic down there,” Rhoda said. “And why unpack? There’s nowhere to put anything.”

“Unpack pajamas and your toothbrush,” Kathy ordered. “And something to read. I have a feeling we won’t fall asleep quickly tonight.”

“I hope we can get to Paris before we come home,” Rhoda said wistfully. “Wouldn’t you love to stock up on Chanel No. 5?”

“From what I hear,” Kathy laughed, “we won’t be able to afford it. Not even in Paris. Inflation’s hit Europe like crazy.”

Though Brian Holmes tried to keep up the spirits of the group, they heard enough from the crew—familiar with Hamburg—to know that conditions were difficult in that city. On the ship they ate in their own private mess, the food plentiful but bland. Some early talk about the excitement of seeing Europe evaporated when Brian used the idle hours aboard ship to stress what was expected of them.

“Boy, am I glad my mother loaded me up with extra bars of soap,” Rhoda giggled on the night before they were to reach Hamburg. “One of the crew told me the only place to buy soap in Hamburg is on the black market.”

“Rhoda, we’re not going on a vacation,” Kathy reminded. But for most of them the glamour of seeing Europe had been an incentive to join the group.

It still amazed Kathy that David Kohn had been born and raised in Berlin. He spoke English as though he’d always lived in America. But wasn’t it going to be awful for him to go back to Germany after losing his family in the Nazi gas chambers?

Kathy and Rhoda stood at the railing of the deck as their ship approached the harbor at Hamburg.

“I read somewhere that Hamburg is called ‘Germany’s door to the world,’” Rhoda said. “It’s one of the most important seaports on the Continent.”

“And not far from the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen,” Kathy said grimly. Their reason for coming to Hamburg was to help victims brought from Bergen-Belsen into relief stations here. “I remember the newspaper reports when the British liberated the camp.” Kathy’s throat was tight in recall. “They found over 10,000 unburied bodies and 40,000 sick and dying prisoners. My Aunt Sophie didn’t stop crying for three days.”

“Remember Ed Murrow reporting on Buchenwald? The way he begged people to believe him when he talked about what he’d seen? ‘I reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it I have no words,’” Rhoda quoted him. “I think more than anybody else Ed Murrow is responsible for my being here.”

Though they had all seen newsreels that showed the devastation of German cities, Kathy—like most of them—was not prepared for what they saw when they arrived in Hamburg.

“Remember, Hamburg was one of the main targets of the Allied bombers,” Brian said gently, feeling their shock as they rode through the bombed-out streets. “Over sixty percent of the homes here were destroyed.”

“Why are those men chopping down the trees?” Kathy asked curiously.

“There’s no coal to be had,” Brian explained. “They’re trying to pile up firewood for the winter ahead. But we’re not concerned with the Germans.” All at once he was terse. “We’re here to help their victims.”

Quarters had been arranged for them in a flat in one of the still-standing apartment houses. One double bed and one single occupied most of the space of each of four bedrooms.

“Cozy,” one of the men labeled these arrangements. “Reminds me of summer camp.”

“We’ll have to post a bathroom schedule.” Rhoda was determined to be cheerful. “Please, nobody come down with diarrhea.”

Almost immediately they joined the relief organization which they were scheduled to assist. Kathy’s major skills were her familiarity with German and her typing speed. Before they plunged into the work ahead, they were shown films of the concentration camps at Belsen and Dachau and Auschwitz.

The room where the films were shown was deathly still until two of the girls broke into sobs. Kathy was terrified she was going to be sick. Unconsciously her eyes moved to David Kohn, feeling rather than seeing his anguish. When the lights came up again, she saw him stumble from the room without a word. The others were suddenly vocal in their recriminations against the Nazis.

“I thought I was prepared for anything,” Kathy stammered. “But not this. Oh, Rhoda, how could it happen?”

As Brian had warned, they worked long hours, sometimes against impossible odds. Kathy tried to explain to an emaciated, obviously once very pretty young girl—perhaps thirteen or fourteen and slowly being coaxed back to a semblance of health after two years in Bergen-Belsen—that it would be difficult to track down American cousins in the Bronx.