Pictures of the Past (20 page)
In the weeks following Taylor’s departure, Sarah would unwrap and rewrap her painting, challenging herself to discover a new secret of its surface. Finally, her mother had encouraged her to hang it in the hallway above the vestibule table.
“Well, let’s just all enjoy it while we arrange our departure. It will calm us, as we wait. Father is still slow in his plans—I know he feels he has a special status because of having a Christian wife. He fears leaving the factory and abandoning what he has built. There are so many concerns, my dear Sarah. We must trust in your father—that he will do what is right for us.
“Let’s put it here,” her mother continued. And as quickly as she said it, she popped an old family portrait of five scary and subdued-faced ancestors out of its frame and pushed in the Lebasque until all the corners fit snugly into place. Again,
beshert.
This new uplifting painting and that old frame—a perfect fit—meant for each other. And so the painting held a prominent spot in the front entrance of the Berger home in Berlin. And now Sarah not only studied the intricacies of the painting, but also the craftsmanship and artwork of the handcrafted mahogany and gold leaf frame that previously she had ignored, but now she embraced so lovingly.
The painting would hang in that position until November 11, 1938—a few days after Kristallnacht— when any valuables became fair game to be smashed, destroyed, or looted. Sarah packed it up—without the frame now—one last time, and when she would eventually board the ship that she thought would bring her to freedom and to Taylor, she marked it prominently with his address and had it placed in the cargo hold. She actually wrapped two small bedroom quilts she had carted from her home around the piece to protect it from careless handling and even the elements of moisture or mold that undoubtedly would accompany it in the bowels of the ship.
Releasing this precious cargo to the ship’s porters was like replaying her good-bye to Taylor. She caressed it with her hands, and blew it a finger wave kiss, as an understanding mate carried it gingerly up the ramp and out of her sight.
After comforting Sarah, her mother left their belongings in a pile and took her hand as she surveyed the surrounding clusters of groups awaiting permission to board the
St. Louis.
As she had anticipated, it was not hard to find a young family that needed an adult helping hand. They were both drawn immediately to a handsomely dressed couple, looking somewhat overwhelmed, as they corralled their three children, the youngest one a newly walking toddler. Just as Inga had been aggressive in addressing Maxwell Selig when she sought information from him, she was determined to talk to these people. Again, Inga acted in such an officious manner that Sarah could hardly believe her plan to remain in Germany was newly formulated.
“Good morning,” she said to them in German, as she scooped up and returned to their circle the oldest child, a boy probably six or seven, who was dashing away from his exhausted father and edging too close to the water.
“Thank you so much,” the father offered quickly.
“As you can see we are in need of more hands,” the mother added, juggling a diaper and bottle while holding the active baby by his suspenders.
Quiet and trying to be helpful was the middle child, a girl around five years old.
“I’m a big help, Mama,” she said defensively, with eyes hungry for her mother’s attention and praise.
“Yes, my sweet Madeline. You are Mama’s big helper.”
Inga gave the parents a sympathetic look and a warm smile. “My dears,” she directed her words to both adults. “I would like to introduce myself—I am Inga Berger and this is my daughter, Sarah.”
At that point Sarah stepped forward and acknowledged the parents and then took a moment to recognize each child in turn with a “pleased to meet you” and a handshake. “I know you are Madeline,” she said to the girl, “and I would be pleased if you would tell me your brothers’ names.”
Madeline warmed to her immediately. “The baby is Berthold, but we call him Berty, and that wild man is Willy.”
The parents felt an immediate respite from chasing the youngsters and introduced themselves as Cecile and Alfred Blumberg.
Inga shook their hands and added, “We are Berliners— or were.”
“And we are from outside of Dresden—but we presume also to be on our way to be Americans, or at least Cubans,” she said with a light, quizzical nuance, signifying no true knowledge of Cuba.
“Well, it will be an adventure—no matter what. And if you would not think me forward, I have a proposition for you. My daughter has her passage booked and I find now that I cannot accompany her. For my own peace of mind, I would like to know that she would have a family to identify with—so she will not feel so lonely.
“As you can see,” she continued, nodding her head in Sarah’s direction as her daughter had already managed to gather the three youngsters in a semicircle and was passing a ball among them, “Sarah has a gift with children—and she knows English well. She could tutor the little ones, and even both of you, if you are not already fluent in English.”
“What a wonderful idea,” the mother answered. “And our needs in those areas are great. But, unfortunately, we cannot pay—we used the last of our money to purchase our tickets. Perhaps another family could afford her services.”
“Oh, my dear, I am so sorry,” Inga responded, embarrassed that she had not been clear. “Oh no—I am not asking for pay for her—just some companionship so I will know she won’t be alone—a dinner table at which to sit. No—you misunderstand—for that she will pay you with help and tutoring.”
Once more the parents turned from Inga to view Sarah with their children. Already Madeline was on Sarah’s lap, as the older girl was retying the bows on their daughter’s braids.
“Mrs. Berger, we are privileged to do so little for you in return for so much.”
“No, it is not too much for my peace of mind. You see—I have just received reason to hope that I might be reunited with my husband. If there is any chance, however small, I must pursue it. Sarah’s final destination will be to meet a young man in Chicago. I need her safely off this continent.”
“Yes, we all need that,” the father interjected solemnly.
Again, Sarah’s mother had made a bright and resourceful move. Giving her the companionship of the Blumberg family gave her five souls to hug as the ship pulled from the harbor and she stood there, tearfully waving and throwing kisses.
Once the sailing was underway, the tugboats having released their lines, the passengers drifted from the rails and moved inside the vessel. And Inga could walk away from the dock knowing that she had done the right thing for all concerned. Her daughter would be on her way to safety and a new life—and she would be free to find her husband—and together, with the will of God—they could work toward reuniting the family someday soon.
The purser was able to relocate Sarah’s room adjacent to the Blumbergs and adjust her dining assignment to their table. While Inga may have recognized that Sarah possessed a natural way with children, what she probably did not anticipate was the endearing relationship that she would form with the mother, Cecile Blumberg. As it was, Cecile was only eight years older than Sarah, and they would wind up bonding tightly with each other.
Before dinner the first night, Sarah knocked on the Blumbergs’ door to see if she might be of assistance in dressing the children. She would not have disturbed their privacy, but she had just passed Alfred Blumberg with young Willy in the corridor on their way to stroll the deck.
When Cecile slowly opened the door, Sarah could tell she had been crying.
“Oh, Mrs. Blumberg,” she began.
“No, we are ‘Cecile’ and ‘Alfred,’ please.”
“Oh, Cecile. What is wrong? Why are you crying? Here you have been comforting me and I’ve thought nothing of your own story.” As she spoke, she saw a cluster of family photos that Cecile was holding in her free hand.
“I’m trying to be strong—I am the mother—I cannot be weak—but I, too, am a daughter—I am a sister. But my family—they were taken from their home—we don’t know where they are—I don’t even know if I did the right thing by escaping and maybe leaving them in harm’s way.”
For the first time in months, Sarah felt the passion of strength that she must have inherited from her mother. Until now, her mother had enabled her to be weak, and now she was ready (and prepared from Inga’s example) to be strong. She put her arms around Cecile.
“For now, we will be sisters,” she simply said, as they clung to each other. Then, after another moment, she added, “Please show me your pictures.”
Cecile let the dozen photos splay along the nearby vanity top. “This is me with my sister, Estelle—I’d say we are about twelve and eight. We are visiting our grandparents’ summer home and our mother has dressed us in matching outfits.” She allowed herself a slight laugh. “I was so mad. You remember that age, almost a teenager. I was mortified to be dressed like an eight-year-old. Look closely, there; her ribbon is askew because I had been pulling her hair in an adolescent tantrum.” She looked up at Sarah, grateful for the audience, for the opportunity to open up about her family.
“And here—this was a year ago—see how much Madeline has grown just since then.” In this picture, she held her daughter in her arms as Cecile stood between her own sister and her mother. The three women were all young looking; you could hardly put them in age order. “We had to take three poses of this picture before Madeline would face the camera. It was worth it now, I know, this waiting for the right shot.”
Later there would be photos taken from this voyage of the
St. Louis
—similarly smiling photos of well-dressed men, women, and children, leaning on railings, relaxing on deck lounges, looking up from dinner tables…people who let their troubles of a past distant shore escape them for moments here and there, who allowed themselves to be lulled into the security of their old lives of friends and food and laughter. These pictures spoke a cruel irony in later years when they were used to document that historic voyage—a part of family albums or museum archives memorializing so many lives that were lost in the Holocaust.
I
t was surprising with all she had on her plate, a demanding position at the fashion magazine, freelancing for the design magazine and preparing for a wedding, that Rachel still had the time and the desire to pursue one more project. Although she loved the warmth and security that Ida’s small Greenwich Village two-bedroom apartment had offered her and Jason, she envisioned simple redecorating that would brighten up the interiors and maybe shine more light on its longtime resident.
She wanted to do this as a gift to Ida for her tremendous hospitality. Though Rachel had a limited budget, she had an unlimited creative flair, a natural ability in the field. Ida met Rachel’s proposal to make a few changes in the apartment with something between approval and enthusiasm, and insisted on extending an ample monetary contribution.
Rachel’s first purchase was a vintage mirror that was calling to her from Sally’s Resale, a dusty old storefront she passed daily that had been rediscovered in the past few years by Park Avenue decorators. Sally confided in Rachel that she knew they were snatching up her items, including the costume jewelry, and offering them to clients at hugely marked-up prices, promoting them as
“tres chic”
additions to rooms or wardrobes.
“What do I care? It’s win-win for me,” Sally confessed. “I just run back to the flea market sellers and restock.”
One thing Rachel splurged on, however, was a scrumptious new bedding set for Ida from Bloomingdales.
After less than a month of preparation, while warehousing all of her purchases in the basement storage area of a friend nearby, Rachel was ready to present the make-over to Ida. She persuaded her to spend two nights at a co-worker’s apartment, and then with the painting help of a gentlemanly neighbor, she was ready for Ida to return to the surprise of the new look. With moderate expense, Rachel accomplished her vision of making the rooms come alive with colors. She integrated the popular earth tones of the era—painting most of the space a light cream, and then adding a rust accent wall in the dining room and a cocoa-colored one behind the living room couch. She placed an area rug under the coffee table and found a fantastic paisley fabric to recover a chair.
Ida walked into the apartment and glanced around. She walked from room to room without really saying anything. For a moment, she bent her head as if her breath had escaped her and she couldn’t take another step. Rachel had a brief thought that maybe she should not have insisted on redecorating, that maybe she had insulted Ida. And then Ida lifted her head and smiled and nodded with gracious approval to Rachel. Ida then took Rachel’s hand and led her back to the kitchen table and motioned for her to pour some hot water and find a tea bag. And then she pointed once again for Rachel to sit down.
“My room when I was young was yellow,” Ida began slowly. “It was one of the few meaningful choices in life I was allowed to make. I chose yellow because I loved the outdoors, especially the warm months. We lived in a town in Hungary. Our springs and summers were extended and they could be glorious. Fields of wildflowers surrounded our home. For me, though, the warm season always ended too quickly and the bleakness of winter remained too long. So I wanted to bring the summer sunshine inside all year round.
“That is why I became an artist,” she continued. This was a surprise to Rachel; she had no idea that Aunt Ida was an artist. There had been no evidence in this apartment of any such inclination.
“I don’t know if you are born with that talent or if you can will yourself to develop that creativity out of necessity,” Ida continued. “But, for me, I believe it was the latter. It was not like today,” and she took Rachel’s hand and walked with her quickly back to the hall bathroom. “You see here—how you put up this simple, but beautiful Picasso print—this colorful bouquet of flowers. Well, I envisioned walls of paintings like this, although I had never seen such work. So bright and beautiful—but you could not go to a store to buy them. Not when you lived in a village. And even in the bigger cities—there was no such thing as inexpensive art available to the masses— of art reproductions for everyday people. That is a modern thing.
“I was a lucky girl in many respects. My brother and I did not share a room, and that was unusual in that time and place. But we were not poor people in the village and we were not a family with six or eight or even ten children, as was common. So my mother indulged me in this one thing after months of begging—to freshen up my drab room.
“Ever since I was very young, in the summer, I would sketch the flowers that were blooming along the roads and in the fields. And now my mother said that for my fourteenth birthday Papa would take me to the city and I could purchase some paints and brushes. This was a shock—Papa was so conservative in everything he did— and our community was very religious, although we were only moderately observant. One more thing—Papa had the son of a learned rabbi in mind for my marriage match—a realistic dream, since Papa was a wealthier man in the village. So it seemed out of character that he would chance having me perceived as a girl of independent thought, who might not be an acceptable bride. But, you must understand, above all he loved making me happy, seeing me smile. I could kiss his cheek for the simplest reason and he would be searching his pockets for candies for me.”
Rachel could not help the soft “oh” that escaped her lips. She was trying to respect Ida’s body language indicating that she could tell her story best slowly and uninterrupted. But Rachel wanted her to know that she was there for her, that she was devouring each memory laid in front of her, as she had been hungry to understand Ida for so long, hoping to bring support to this woman who had helped her so much.
“By this time, over the past few years and continuing on, my friends would be leaving the town with their families—something between relocating and running away. Most of them wanted to follow relatives to America. When they did go, they would be leaving behind items they could not carry. We would never pilfer from an abandoned property—that was not our way—and, as I said, we were not a needy family. But friends would continually offer us furniture or clothing or fabrics or some cherished item that they could not feasibly transport.
“But, no matter how beautiful an item and how adoringly I cherished it—integrated it into my wardrobe or my room—I would rather have had my friend return to reclaim it.”
At this point Ida paused, as if the words of her memories had actually transported her back in time and she was not sitting in a New York apartment, but was truly in the bedroom of her youth in Hungary. For a few moments, she wanted to savor the pleasant images that were surfacing. And then, she took a deep breath and continued. “In particular, I remember wanting to see Raizel once more, with her plump cheeks and full skirts; I wanted to hear her infectious laugh. I wanted her to sit on her floral ottoman that was now my vanity chair. I wanted her to come through the door and say I am so sorry but we didn’t go far, so might I retrieve this or that.”
Ida took Rachel’s hand once again and brought her to sit in her bedroom on the new comforter that Rachel had purchased. Like a child, she bounced a few times on the mattress and patted the pillows.
“My first big project was making a patchwork quilt of all the fabrics that we had inherited from these neighbors. But I chose only the bright colors to make up my bedspread. And then, right on the walls, not on canvasses to hang, I would reproduce the flowers of my sketches and those in my memory. I had a mural of a field. I was terrific in recreating the fern-like green leaves with tiny white blooms and that was what bordered my whole room like an indoor hedge. And then I had the idea to draw a gate opening in that field. Later, in America, when I learned a little more about art just by walking through galleries, I understood my technique was
trompe l’oleil,
a technique for making a flat piece appear three-dimensional to ‘fool the eye.’”
“Aunt Ida,” Rachel said and then paused for a lengthy time, now being the one to grasp her aunt’s hands and search her eyes. “Why don’t I know any of this? Why have I never seen any evidence of your artwork? Honestly,” and now she was trying to lighten the moment, “I don’t even see you doodling on phone pads.”
“There is a reason.” She spoke now so softly, with her head bowed once again, so that Rachel had to listen intently to her. “Rachel, you see…and this is hard for me to speak of…”
At this point Rachel could have backed off, insisted she had not meant to upset her, but she felt maybe it was time for Ida to have a cathartic moment—she knew that she could lend an empathetic ear to her story, so she encouraged her to continue.
“This which you call a ‘talent’—was a blessing—and a curse. When the Nazis rounded up our small family, after mutilating our Torah and setting fire to our synagogue, and then moving business by business, house by house until they felt they had one more town empty of Jews, they loaded us onto trucks, like cattle, for a short distance to the train station. This was already 1944, and I was seventeen years old. We had heard rumors of this— heard how they orchestrated the pretense of peacefully relocating families with their belongings, but then they confiscated everything and loaded them on trains to detention or extermination camps. But for us there was no pretense. How they handled us—by the time they came for us—again it was later in the war—we were not fools to their motives—we were fools to have remained. With each family you were first driven from your house and then told to go back in and pack one small suitcase. On this count, these people were smart—this way we selected items of greatest value
for
them. They didn’t have to waste time rummaging through our drawers.
“And these horrid intruders, many of them conscripted to the army from local farms, were often faces familiar to us, as customers at our father’s store. Did this give them a heightened sensitivity toward our plight? No, this gave them an outlet to vent against perceived in justices. We were the scapegoats for all their ills. ‘Yes, this Jew overcharged me on my tools or this Jew put his finger on the scale when weighing my purchase,’ when the reality was the storekeeper…for sure I know my father did…often extended credit to these boys’ families or added candy here or there when a hungry child stood eyeing the counter.
“On each transport, the truck and then the train, my family remained huddled together, as did the others. As you can imagine, we were exposed to all the indignities of loss of privacy for our physical needs. We did have room to sit, unlike other packed cars where I know people could only stand.” And then, as if an aside, she looked up at Rachel, saying, “You must understand that much of what I tell you, I learned after the war.”
And then she looked once more into space. “We each found something to focus on to occupy our time. For me, it was my sketching. Papa would use the time to instruct young Jacob on history, mathematics, and astronomy, as if we were on a family vacation in the summer and he wanted him prepared for the new school term the next week. Many of the others listened intently to the words of my father, a truly self-taught man. But another father, a rabbi, berated my own—‘Only Torah—only Torah— do not waste energy with words of the secular world.’ We knew the answer that would be coming from Papa— ‘So, Rebbe—where is God now? Tell me—where is our God now?’ And the rebbe and his family circle turned their backs on us and shunned us. It was good for me because I could laugh to myself, ‘There goes my match.’
“But I ask God still—where was he when we emerged from our railway car at our final destination? A phrase greeted us on the gates,
‘Arbeit Macht Frei,’
‘Work Will Set You Free.’ Yes, we had arrived at Auschwitz.”
The words slammed into Rachel like a brick. Spontaneously, she moved closer to Ida and gently rubbed her back.
“The men and women were separated immediately; somehow we knew that would happen. I had initially retained a certain strength of spirit knowing I would remain with my mother. I had been watching the selection process intently. First, they would look through the valises—remove a few items for the bins—and then throw them on a large wagon and point for the people to follow an established line delineated by gender.
“They smiled at my mother’s haul—a few modest pieces of gold jewelry—some in the town had none— some coins and paper money—good—then the photographs of life—that would be trash.
“And now my bag was opened to them. And you know what it was—paintings and sketches—so many that they knew immediately they were not purchased. As I began to say before, during the transport, everyone occupied their time differently—I drew more. Without even being aware of it, I had begun documenting the Holocaust.
“Roughly, they pulled me aside. I thought they would kill me immediately. I screamed—I did not want to be separated from my mother.” Again a long pause, “I never saw her again. I never saw any of my family again, unless you count the smoke of the furnaces.” By this time, Rachel had grasped Ida’s hands so that she could hold and comfort her. But Ida had no tears, as if all those emotions had been spent long before Rachel arrived in New York.
“Allow me to be brief here. I was taken to one of the officers of the camp who the guards knew would appreciate their singling out someone with my ability—they felt they would be rewarded for their find—and I believe they were. For my time in the camp, I would be drawing constantly. But they tore my pictures documenting the horror of the trains. They wanted sketches of the officers in their uniforms and then naked sketches of the women they were using as their whores. Innocent Jewish women, like me. On this, please, I can say no more.” And again there was an extended silence that Rachel did not breach.
