Letter from my Father (5 page)

Refugees like us were people who did not belong to any country. The Germans called it
staatlos
, which meant stateless. The Americans referred to us as
Displaced Persons
or DPs. We were people in search of a country, but displaced made us sound as if we were objects being moved around. I did not like it.

IV

New Parents

S
tuttgart, our home for the next four-and-a-half years, had been heavily bombed during the war and had streets and streets of nothing but rubble. The ruins were like those in Tarnopol but there were more of them. The city was in the American zone of West Germany. The American army had set up a DP camp for Jewish people in Reinsburgerstrasse, a long street in what had been a pleasant quarter of town. The German people who lived there were required to move to another part of the city. The DP camp was operated by UNRRA, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Ad-ministration. My uncle talked a lot about their good work.

The DP camp was like a little village. By this time I was eight years old and enrolled as Ester Kahane at the Bet Bialik School, named after the famous poet of Zion, Chaim Nachman Bialik. The camp also had a little hospital, a synagogue and a public canteen for the distribution of the food that was provided by UNRRA. The mothers and other ladies used what they were given to cook hot meals for the school-children every day. General Eisenhower, who headed the American Army, had ruled that those of us who were victims of racial, religious or political persecution were to be given a daily food ration of 2500 calories. This meant that we were properly nourished.

My uncle liked to explain our situation in detail and I was eager to listen. The camp was being run by a group called the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in Stuttgart. They set up a number of community groups to help the refugees return
to leading normal lives. Normal to me meant not being frightened. They held elections for the committee and soon became part of a bigger organisation of liberated Jews calling themselves She'erit Hapleta, the Remnants of the Holocaust. They administered the camps with UNRRA and the Americans.

Lots of things happened in Reinsburgerstrasse. There were adult education classes and a newspaper,
Oif der Frei
(Free Again). Music and plays were performed and Yiddish films shown. I loved
Mirele Efros
starring the famous Polish Jewish actress, Ida Kaminska. It told the story of an elderly Jewish mother who gives everything to her children. But they don't appreciate it. They are cruel to her. When things go badly for them they invite her to her grandson's
Bar Mitzvah
, and she initially refuses. Then she says resignedly g
ute Kinder, schlechte Kinder, aber Kinder
. This meant that whether the children are good or bad, they are her children. Aunt Gita could not stop quoting it. My uncle said that
Mirele Efros
was like a Jewish
King Lear
. I really did not know who King Lear was.

My school was situated in a three-storey apartment block halfway down Reinsburgerstrasse. It backed on to a little hill so that though the entry was at ground floor level, the first floor, where my classroom was, opened on to a raised garden. The floor above us was for the upper school. The top floor was also used by the Zionist youth group, Hashomer Hatzair, which trained older students to become pioneers and fighters for the state of Israel, Erez Israel. They were taught how to defend themselves. The
Kulturhaus
or community centre of the camp was in the school's large hall which we used for assemblies.

Most of the Jewish people living in the apartments on Reinsburgerstrasse were cut off from the newly
denazified
Germans. Denazified meant that people had their Nazi beliefs taken out of them. When we arrived, all the housing blocks were full, so orders were given that those Stuttgart households where a member had belonged to the Nazi Party now had to offer accommodation to the DPs.

We were lucky. My uncle inspected some places and found one for us away from crowded, noisy Reinsburgerstrasse. We rented two rooms from a German couple whose villa was in a street lined with lilac trees, high up on a hill, Gebelsbergstrasse 28. We shared the bathroom and kitchen with them. At the back there was an orchard with cherry, plum and apple trees and white, pink and red rosebushes. The basement cellar was used for storing preserves.

The two front rooms were used by our landlords, Herr and Frau Gerold. We were given two rooms at the end of the hall. My uncle and aunt's room was large, with a big wardrobe at one end and a window which looked out over the orchard. The other was used as our living and dining room and I also slept there. There was a red shiny sofa in the corner which at night became my bed. If we had visitors when I was meant to be asleep, the adults talked very softly as they drank tea. But I could still hear what they were saying and listened to their conversation until I fell asleep. Sometimes they talked far into the night about some terrible experience of the War, their own or what they had heard from others. They also talked about plans and ways and means to get out of bloodsoaked Europe to the United States (most desirable) or even Canada. They complained that they had arrived too late to get the visas for the United States that had been offered in 1945. But, they whispered, you could get around this official ruling by pretending to have arrived in Germany then.
After all, where would we all be now if everything in our lives had been strictly legal?
There was also secret talk among the women about how they used their new identity documents to lower their ages. At the beginning of 1948, when it seemed likely that a state of Israel (Erez Israel) would be established, going there became the main topic of conversation.

On Sundays in our quiet street all you could hear was the sound of church bells. Sometimes when my uncle and aunt had visitors during the day, I was allowed to lie and read in
their bedroom. As I gazed out the window on a spring day with the scent of blossom from the fruit trees wafting in on a light breeze which cooled my face and body, my whole being felt excited and happy.

If I was surrounded by adult talk and thought about serious things just like the grown-ups did, I still sometimes ran and jumped like a child. On summer days, my girlfriend Ilonka and I would take a bucket to the orchard and pick as many cherries as we could. We would sit down on the grass and eat them by the handful.

Across the street from the villa, a set of steps led down to a park with a bandstand in the middle. From it the lawn sloped down to a theatre and the main street of town. On Sundays bands played in the park and men in lederhosen yodelled as people strolled up and down. We often watched. On winter mornings when it had snowed, I loved being the first to make tracks in the fresh white surface, hopping and skipping and then looking back at the imprint of my boots. The only sound was the crunch of the snow.

In spring the lilac trees came into bloom all along the street. I was intoxicated with their heady scent and they became my favourite flower. I loved picking them and tearing off the petals:
He loves me. He loves me not
. My uncle could not have chosen a better place for us.

Sometimes there was tension between Frau Gerold, a minister's daughter, and Aunt Gita. Frau Gerold took a certain amount of pride in her husband's membership of the Nazi Party. She was a mild-mannered lady who did not really understand how much she was offending my aunt, who fiercely referred to
Nazi Schweine
, Nazi pigs. But in spite of these occasional arguments, the two women got along fairly well. It was a special treat for everyone when the two of them collected rose petals from the garden to make delicious rose jam. Sometimes a live chicken was bought, beheaded, plucked and made into good flavoured chicken soup.

It was hard for me to connect the gentlemanly Herr Gerold, who became very fond of me, with the people who had murdered my mother and father and so many of my people. When we left Stuttgart after five years he presented me with a book of Schiller poems with the inscription:
To dearest Ester, in remembrance of her young years spent in Stuttgart, with best wishes for her further life journey from the Gerold family.

We children were barely aware of the German people around us. We saw them when we went shopping or took a bus, and occasionally went to their cinemas, theatres and opera house. But mostly ours was a life apart.

At Bet Bialik School I was the youngest in my class of twelve students, since many of the other boys and girls had never been to school because of the War. In Class 5, I was nine years old but most of my classmates were fourteen, fifteen or even older. To get to school in the mornings I needed to walk along Gebelsbergstrasse, turn left into another long street, part of which went through a tunnel, and then catch a tram. I was proud to be allowed to go alone or sometimes with a friend, and felt very grown-up. But then I found out that my Wujek had for weeks walked at a distance behind me so I would not see him, to make sure that I arrived safely.

Because there were only seventy children in the school, some classes were very small. Mine was the largest, with twelve students. Many professional people chose to teach there, though most were not trained as teachers. During our first years in Stuttgart, my uncle taught History and Geography. When he took my class I behaved as well as I could so as not to embarrass him. The other children thought of him as a teacher who was calm and did not get angry. Dr Chaim Shmeruk, who taught us Yiddish, was later appointed the first Professor of Yiddish at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

At Bet Bialik, being an orphan did not make me different. Most of my classmates had one or both parents and whole families murdered in the War. We were all, as my uncle put
it, stateless survivors in a state of transition. Our families had been slaughtered in concentration camps, labour camps, ghettos and forests. At the school we were all Jewish so I was just like everyone else. I could proudly call myself by my real name, Ester.

My classmates liked me and wrote lovely poems and messages in my little Remembrance Book, but they thought of me as a child. I wore my long plaits pinned across my head and I was plump because I was always being
fattened up
to make me healthy, so I still looked like a child. I would hear the others whispering among themselves about getting
parcels from the Red Cross
. They refused to tell me what they meant. Finally I found out that this was their way of referring to menstruation. I felt I was excluded from their club. In Tarnopol during the War being different from Aryan people had been frightening. Now difference just made me feel awkward. But I still didn't like it.

I made friends with Rivka and Rachel and Irena, who were just a little older than I. There was also a boy I liked called Ari. Ilonka was my special friend. She lived close to us and her mother and father were friendly with my uncle and aunt. She was a year older than me and had a baby brother, and I was devoted to her and a little jealous. I would have loved to have had a sister or brother. Ilonka told me what grown-ups did to have a baby, but I did not believe her. It was just too disgusting.

Sometimes Ilonka said bad things about me behind my back. When I found out it hurt, and I cried bitterly. I just could not understand how anyone could be so mean. If you loved somebody you were supposed to be kind to them and never ever make them cry. My uncle and aunt told me that I trusted too much, that I must learn not to be so honest and open with my friends. Then I would not feel the hurt so badly. I found this hard.

I learned to read and write Hebrew well and liked to rehearse all the tenses. I did well in most subjects, but badly in Yiddish. Some of my classmates spoke Yiddish at home so were fluent. We spoke Polish at home and my uncle and aunt only spoke Yiddish when they did not want me to understand. I could read the language better than I could speak it, and enjoyed lessons when we read funny, sad stories by Sholom Aleichem and Mendele Mocher Sfurim. My teacher said that Mendele Mocher Sfurim had
a heart overflowing with love and pity for his people.

On all my reports, the teachers commented that I talked too much in class – and out of it. It was true. I became very enthusiastic and liked to share my thoughts and feelings with my friends. After all, at home, I was only ever surrounded by adults talking about serious issues and gossiping about other adults.

Bet Bialik's main aim was to prepare us for Aliya (resettlement in Israel) and Erez Israel, migration to the land of Israel. All teaching and learning was supposed to be in Hebrew, but we only used it to learn the history of the Jewish people and some mathematics. At a performance one day at school I recited Bialik's poem
Al Hazippor
(To the Bird) – in Hebrew, of course. It was full of the love of Zion and was so inspiring. I imagined myself as the bird that was able to fly all the way to Israel. We also learned Israeli dancing and Hebrew songs and came to know the map of Palestine better than any other country.

Now I loved being Jewish. I knew I belonged to this great tribe of people. In my Remembrance Book, my friend Klara expressed in Polish exactly what I felt. In translation it reads:

You are Jewish

Honour Judaism

Work for it

Live for it!

The main problem at the school was that we had no text-books. In some subjects we had to use German texts, though we had not learned German. For other subjects the school managed to get Polish books. Sometimes we spoke in class in one language and used books in another.

In the garden at the back of the building our class was given a bed to plant. We were taught to till the black soil with a large heavy spade and to plant straight rows of vegetable seeds such as carrots and radishes, potatoes and lettuce. We tended our garden with buckets of water filled from the one and only tap. We wanted our class garden to be the best. We were very proud of it. Growing our own vegetables and fruit was preparing us for when we settled in our beloved Erez Israel.