Shattered Crystals, Mia Amalia Kanner [cat reading book txt] 📗

“There wasn’t supposed to be a patrol.”

Winter and spring of 1939 seemed an unending trip between Leipzig, Halle and Berlin. I traveled between these cities so often that the conductors began to greet me when they punched my ticket. If they knew I was Jewish, they never gave any indication of it. I would gaze at the passing landscape and take comfort from the fact that I was just like everyone else in the car. For the length of the journeys, my primary identity was a passenger on a train, not a Jew without a home.

My legal residence was now at a dressmaker’s apartment. Immediately after Sal’s departure for France, I had gone to the Judenrat. Herr Neman had shown me a list of available homes and said, “The room you rent is your official address. You must sign the register at least once a week. Be sure to be there at least that often.”

“Yes, I know the rules. It is the same in Leipzig. My father’s apartment has been designated a Jewish residence. You know, Herr Neman, the girls are staying with him, so I need only a small room for myself. But I would like it to be near the railroad station.”

The first home I looked at was that of a middle-aged dressmaker. Frau Feldman was a sad, gray-haired woman with straight pins stuck in a neat row on the lapel of her faded smock. Her sewing machine stood in the living room, where she now also slept.

The seamstress led me through the narrow hall of the apartment. “My bedroom is occupied by two aged spinsters who have been driven out of their home. They keep to themselves and come out only to prepare meals three times a day. Of course, I keep a kosher kitchen.” She opened a door at the end of the hall. “The room faces the street. It is my son’s bedroom. He is twenty-three years old. He is in Buchenwald.”

The single bed was covered with a blue and tan striped spread that matched the wallpaper in the narrow room. The other pieces of furniture were a desk and chair and a dresser. A globe stood on the desk, and a framed diploma from Halle University hung on the wall. These were the sole reminders of the boy who had occupied the room. It was to be my new home.

“I shall be coming in a few days, as soon as I finish closing my home,” I said.

The seamstress nodded impassively and handed me a key. I walked out wondering which would be worse: boarding in someone else’s home, or having strangers occupy my dining room and bedrooms and sharing my kitchen?

Four large trunks with clothing, linen and bedding, and the crates filled with dishes and silver were lined up against the walls ready for the movers. One project remained before they came. I still had books to pack, almost three hundred volumes that Sal and I had accumulated. These included biographies of great Jewish thinkers, books about Jewish history and Eretz Yisrael and bound editions of Jewish classics.

By far, the most valuable and venerated set of books in our house had been Markus’s Gemara, hand-bound in leather. It was a 1789 edition and had been handed down from father to son for generations. As I was looking at my bound editions of Goethe, Schiller, Heine and Schopenhauer, I thought of the beautiful, priceless holy volumes that the Nazis had ripped to shreds. The torn, crumpled pages and strips of leather had been scattered all over the floor. It occurred to me now that the Nazis must have used knives to cut up the holy books, and I felt the stab of the knives in my heart.

I was overcome again by that same grief and anguish that had enveloped me when I first faced the dreadful disorder perpetrated by the filthy Nazis in Markus’s sanctuary. Rage overcame my pain. In an explosive movement of sheer violence, I swept the German classics from the shelves onto the bare floor. One by one, I picked them up and methodically destroyed them. All that remained from my extensive German collection were a dozen books written by Jews—Heinrich Heine, Sholom Aleichem and Franz Werfel. These I dusted and packed.

Hot and exhausted, I sank into an upholstered chair, surrounded by boxes filled with torn-up books. I realized that when the janitor came to carry out the cartons, he would see that I had “desecrated” the German books. So I trampled the shredded pages in the cartons to flatten them. Then I covered the remnants of the books with cleaning rags and old newspapers.

That evening I telephoned my sister in Paris and found Sal was at my sister’s house. I told him he was not to worry. I had finished packing, and I had found a new home near the railroad station.

A few days later, five men from the moving company arrived. Piece by piece, they crated my furniture, the foreman calling out each item and checking it off on the list Sal had prepared. The men loaded the crates on wooden dollies and trucked them down the flights of stairs to the waiting van.

“These crates will be stored in our warehouse,” the foreman said. “I cannot tell you when they will be shipped abroad. It may be several months. You will be advised. Heil Hitler.”

Politely, I said, “Thank you.” I no longer trembled when men said “Heil Hitler.” As long as the tone and the speaker were not threatening, the words did not matter any more, hateful though they were.

In my coat, I walked through the empty rooms, turning out the lights, hearing the echoes of my heels on the bare floor. Without the draperies and the furniture, my paintings and china plates on the wall, without my family filling the rooms, the apartment no longer felt like my home. I had expected to be distressed to leave my home of almost ten years, but nothing remained except my suitcase. I shrugged, picked up the valise, and closed the door behind me.

That night, I passed the first of many lonely hours in the young man’s room at the dressmaker’s house.

I spent as much time in Leipzig as I deemed safe. Thirteen strangers, members of five Jewish families, lived in my father’s apartment. They ranged in age from a couple in their eighties who occupied my old room, to a one-month-old infant, born while his father was in Buchenwald.

Soon after I was forced to vacate my Halle apartment, the young mother secured approval to return to her parents in Hungary. “They are leaving next week, Mia,” my father told me. “I have persuaded our Judenrat not to send anyone else. The girls will be able to sleep in the den.” He led me into the living room, which he had kept for himself. “I am trying to train Lea to stay out of the bedroom,” he said, “but she wants to run everywhere. It is very crowded, but we manage. Each family has its time in the kitchen. Everyone keeps to the schedule I made up.”

In the dining room, the wife of a bank clerk had set up two canvas cots for her two sons. Suitcases and trunks lined all the available wall space. My father’s boarders had either stored or abandoned their furniture. But all had brought clothing and linen, radios, framed photographs of beloved family members, favorite objects. The old couple came with three potted cactus plants. The