Pictures of the Past (16 page)
A
lmost weekly, letters were exchanged between Sarah and Taylor, although sometimes what seemed like an interminable amount of time would pass and then three letters might be delivered in a bunch as a welcome surprise. They were careful to exclude specifics of any future plans, cautious that censors or spies might be editing their words and reporting to superiors. So they were only able to write freely of feelings, emotions, and dreams, as if they were simply forlorn lovers like Romeo and Juliet, separated by warring families, not national ideologies.
And then suddenly there was no communication. In the first weeks of desperation, he would make lists, resources he could use to track her down. Embassies, the Red Cross, the HIAS Jewish Agency he had learned about through his research. He would search newspapers, place cables to contacts in Switzerland and all over Europe. It was as if she had simply vanished into thin air. He was nervous even about his efforts to find her—could it hurt her in some way? Would he be opening a hornet’s nest if she was using her status as part Christian to disappear into the countryside, to masquerade as a pure Aryan?
F
or the Berger family, luck and time were running out. It seemed almost a distant memory now to eighteen-year-old Sarah—the sweet words, caresses and dreams she had shared with her American love. In the year following Taylor’s departure, Sarah’s family slowly began making arrangements to leave Germany, as laws against Jewish business owners became stricter. Communications with Taylor were extremely difficult, but he worked from his end to facilitate their transition to America, postponing commitments to Emily, covering his actions as humanitarian efforts. And then the unimaginable happened. Whether from lack of strong motivation on Emanuel’s part to leave the business or an inability to arrange their departure from Berlin, the Berger family was caught in the horrific devastation of Kristallnacht.
It had been one more night of chill to add to the calendar that November, and the chill was not just a product of the cool temperature and the brisk breeze of the late fall, but it was the chill that Taylor had perceptively described in midsummer almost a year and a half before. Sarah called it the shadow, the disruptive, unsettling feeling that had become part of her very existence. The shadow had eclipsed her immediate world. Her parents reflected a pall of fear; the young schoolchildren, no longer interacting in spirited outdoor play, were becoming increasingly thin and anemic looking, and were one by one escaping the cloud with their families.
Sarah and her mother were on a mission that evening. Their elderly neighbor, Hanna Sagan, barely able to climb the stairs to her second-floor apartment, had been wracked by the weather with arthritic bouts. And so, the Bergers scraped the pots and pans of their more than ample dinner so that they could offer her nourishment along with company.
On the way, they passed Officer Miller who was standing at the corner once again, but he no longer had his nonchalant pose of boredom and seemed rather to be pacing to and fro in an agitated manner. They walked past him quickly, careful not to catch his eye, keeping their heads down, Inga holding the dinner cache with a firm hand on the lid, so that none of the pleasing aromas would invite him nearer. Wilhelm Miller was more than aware of their obvious shunning, and, surprisingly, it was hurtful to him. When he was a policeman in ordinary times, he always felt he was a favorite of Sarah and her friends. He was adored; there were smiles all around. But now he understood that he was perceived as a conduit of the SS. Now that his uniform markings were more boldly offensive to the residents of his district, things had changed. Others in his patrol had risen to the occasion and they wore their elevated status proudly, taking pleasure in executing any new orders sent from the headquarters of the Third Reich. But Wilhelm was different. He was wounded by the loss of the melody of Sarah’s giggles, by the denial of her mother’s captivating greeting and her succulent strudel treats. He wished he could say,
This is not my doing.
He wished he could recapture the elegant Mrs. Berger’s favor. But, especially in front of his colleagues, he knew he must appear distant and even offensive, and he would try to present facial expressions to the residents that would mimic the return of an unfavorable gift of spoiled meat. Eventually, he was no longer surprised by their rude demeanor. From the charming young Sarah and the beautiful Mrs. Berger, he knew to expect only piteous looks of betrayal and scorn.
All that may change on this night, though, he was thinking. With the onset of evening, he would try one last act to redeem himself in their eyes, and to cautiously distance himself from his post. He would warn them of what was ahead. He knew where and when his fellow officers were gathering to begin a marauding night of destruction to the Jews—where they lived, where they worked, where they prayed. He saw the directives; there would be intensified roundups for the work camps. Inside the police station only hours before, there was a party atmosphere as orders were dispersed along with so many wooden batons and metal bars. Outwardly, he had joined in the rally, but in his mind he was actually formulating treasonous thoughts. Oh yes, he whistled along with the others who were singing the songs of the motherland; he raised his arms in victory yelps and supportive salutes.
But he knew that he was not quite like the others, and he took a certain pride in his independence, although he feared that eventually it would cost him dearly. He only hoped to protect the simple pleasures of his daily routines. Those pleasures, although they had faded, had far surpassed the burdensome weight of his evenings at home, where he was greeted by the chipmunk pouch face of his wife, a square-shaped woman, almost as wide as she was tall, who had long since redistributed the appealing swell of her breasts to meld with her corpulent midsection. And to add further insult to the injury of his bridal choice, the gravity of years had pulled on the once alluring charm of her smile, settling it firmly into a permanent scowl. Constantly, he berated himself for succumbing to the lure of her father’s connections with officials in the police department in asking for her hand…not that his choices would ever have been grand. He knew that his impoverished background and the ungraceful presentation of his own physical attributes would never have prompted someone like the elegant Mrs. Berger to have looked his way. No, this woman, a Christian like himself, who would never have considered him for a suitor, had actually chosen a Jew for a husband. And yet, he admitted, he always respected the very affable Herr Berger. Many times, this man, whose work hours were long and whose home hosted a parade of important visitors, would take the time to talk to him, even offering him a specially made insert for his walking boots, when he noticed an uncharacteristic limp in the officer’s gait.
And so on that night, although he knew that he alone could do nothing to stop the tidal wave that would strike, he was waiting for Mrs. Berger and her daughter when they came back down the stairs. He planned to stop them with a dissonant “halt,” if need be.
“Darling,” Inga cried, rushing back into the house, shouting “Emanuel” once—and then a second time with a stronger urgency—that finally brought her husband from the kitchen with his glass of tea. She ran to him and grabbed it from him, the sway of the movement swishing the hot drink so that it scalded her hand, but she waved away his efforts of comfort.
“Oh, darling. Something big, something bad will be happening tonight. It has already started.” She had been thinking that that fool policeman Miller had finally proven himself a useful civil servant, and now, even in her state of anxiety, she reconsidered her assessment of him and decided to be more generous with her words. “That policeman—Miller—the one who stalks our corner…I’m not sure why…but he just did something kind. He warned us just now. He warned us to go home immediately. And to stay inside—away from the windows, he said, and specifically—away from the synagogue. He actually accosted us so that we were scared of what he might do—and yet he wanted to make sure we understood that there will be terror in our streets tonight.”
Emanuel backed away from her and looked straight into her eyes. He moved his head from side to side, seemingly as one would before revealing a secret, and then he nodded to his daughter who had been standing by the door so that she knew that he wanted to address her, as well. “A pogrom,” Emanuel said. “The curse of our generations. A pogrom now on these very streets.” And they huddled together for many minutes, sharing the same questions—would something happen on signal or would a pulsation build from street to street? They discussed ways to warn more of the neighbors, as Sarah had immediately rushed back up the stairs and cautioned Mrs. Sagan to remain quiet in her house, away from the windows.
And then they wondered how to protect their beautiful Neue Synagogue. It was only five years before, with the opening of the Jewish museum next door on Oraneinburger Strasse, that they had donated kiddush cups and silver Shabbat candelabras from Emanuel’s mother’s family. They fretted about all of the precious artifacts from their family and others that would be at risk, but knew they were of no significance compared to the sacred Torah scrolls that would be in jeopardy. And so they set their route toward that very destination, donning once again the coats and hats and gloves they had just removed, hoping to give a timely warning to the rabbi and the caretakers of what was ahead, spreading the word from building to building before they settled back at their own residence.
They did not spend that evening listening to the usual pattern of alternating recordings of Brahms and Tchaikovsky symphonies or playing their own much more meager interpretations on the piano. Instead, they paced the house and peered outside and listened through the slivers of open windows on the second floor, reacting to each shout and crash and scream outside with a cupping of their mouths, a chorus of “Oh my Gods,” and anguished visual exchanges.
And then there was a knock on the door, so light at first that only Sarah, with the acute hearing of youth, noticed it, until they all reacted to the growing intensity of the pounds. They had inched down the stairs, but no one moved toward the front room. Instead, they huddled by the kitchen door.
“Emanuel—open up.”
It was a familiar voice, but none of the three recognized it immediately until they heard, “It’s me. It’s Jacob—-Jacob Dritz.”
At that point they separated quickly, as if vying to be the first to receive the man, and when the door was unlocked and opened, he practically fell into the room and into the net of their arms. There was a steady stream of blood winding down from an open cut on his forehead and snaking past his right eye and his cheek, ending in a shocking pool of red broadening on his white collar. With the slightest nod from Inga, Sarah ran to dampen a cloth at the sink and when she quickly returned, she relinquished it to her mother who held it to Jacob’s wound with a steady pressure.
Like Emanuel, Jacob was well known, not just in the Jewish community, but in all of Berlin. He and his brother, Joseph, owned two of the premier department stores in the city, one on Unter den Linden and the other on Koernerstrasse. After the first round of boycotts of Jewish businesses in 1933, Joseph had left the country, his wife inconsolable over fears for their four small children. But the elder Jacob, able to send his married daughters and their husbands on to relatives already in New York, had been holding out through the waves of economic Aryanization.
Although they had wanted him to lay still and recover, at his insistence, the Bergers wrapped him with a blanket and Emanuel cautiously moved him through the seclusion of three adjacent backyards, to be reunited with his wife, Ruth, already in a desperate state.
On November 9, 1938, this “Night of Broken Glass,” echoed throughout Berlin and other cities of Nazi Germany. Store windows were smashed and contents were looted and destroyed; synagogues were set afire and decimated, and countless Jews were attacked. And the next morning brought no relief, as many of the remaining Jewish men, often those so prominent that they ignored the first emigration waves, were rounded up.
When they came for Emanuel Berger, he let them take him without any resistance. His bowed countenance revealed a pathetic resignation that came with the understanding that he was foolish for ignoring the warning signs of what was coming. His stubbornness to remain in Berlin to protect his factory, despite pleas from his wife and daughter and his daughter’s new young American suitor, had placed his family in great peril. He was so overcome with guilt that his body had no further place to store the emotion of fear. As the front door reverberated from the smashed glass forced entry of the Gestapo, he simply stacked up papers he was working on that would delineate his holdings and passed them surreptitiously to Inga. He asked them as politely as one would ask a valet at a restaurant if he might get his hat and coat. He knew that above all, he did not want to leave his house being dragged like a victim—he wanted to proceed in dignity, to minimize the distress to his beloved women.
As it turned out, initially, he was taken no farther than the local police station, where he was jailed. When Inga had briefly glimpsed him through the window bars on a second floor cell, she had seen desperation and maybe resignation in his eyes, a look that would continue to haunt her. She stood outside his jail for a week, protesting with the other Aryan wives that their husbands should be exempt from the Jewish statutes. On the eighth day, she could see him motion to her from a window. She barely recognized him, his nose askew and face bruised.
He was urging her to leave with side nods of his head. She was beginning to understand. Her protests were having a negative effect. They were disruptive to the jail warden who needed to squelch such activity quickly. He wanted to eliminate any incidents that reflected negatively on his position. He knew the Nazi officers sought and valued order and discipline and so he retaliated on those arrested when he was made to look bad.
When Inga returned a final time to the prison, now under hooded cover, the news was bleaker than ever— Emanuel was gone—transferred, they said. They had moved his group during the night in a truck convoy of prisoners. They would not provide more information— but most likely he would be taken by train to a more remote location, perhaps to one of those rumored camps.
It was months later that Sarah and her mother came upon yet one more inn, as they wearily walked the countryside with one horse and a small cart with their bags.
“My husband has been taken as a soldier. He was not good with money ever, and our food could not sustain us. We are good workers. I have been employed for years at a tavern. That’s where he met me. A customer—a good one—I should have known he’d be a bigger drinker as time went along. But I have no regrets. I have my lovely daughter here, partially thanks to him. And here I offer my child as a worker. She’ll serve you well as a maid. Knows her linens and toilette routines. But she is bright too, could even be a hostess—picked up on languages at some of the big houses where she’s gotten experience.”
