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

worry, reason that cast away any doubt I may have had about sending the girls to America. Soon after the children departed, the situation for Jews in France began to deteriorate once more.

From OSE officials, we heard reports of repressive measures against Jews in the Unoccupied Zone. Taking their orders from the Nazis, the Vichy officials of the Unoccupied Zone oversaw the July 1941 decree to “eliminate all Jewish influence from the national economy.” The takeover of Jewish-owned businesses escalated rapidly. A census of Jews ordered in June made available to the police details of the whereabouts of almost every Jew in the country. Thousands of German and Austrian Jews who had managed to make their way to the Unoccupied Zone were arrested and interned. Even French Jews were not immune from arrest.

As a precaution, the OSE directors in Limoges decided to close Chateau Mas Jambot, the OSE home near that city. They feared the children would not be safe in a home situated so close to an important city, a city that was itself not far from Vichy. The OSE acquired Le Couret, a large century-old house deep in the forests of Haute Vienne, away from the collaborationist French regime that controlled Limoges.

Madame Krakowski was put in charge of Le Couret, and I was asked to move there to become the cook. When the OSE agreed that I could take Lea with me and that Sal could also come, I was happy to go.

I knew some of the children from Eaubonne, but most were strangers to me, as Mas Jambot was their first OSE home. More than one hundred children lived in Le Couret, many of them over nine years old. As had been the case in La Chevrette, they found their way to my kitchen seeking an adult to talk to or looking for extra morsels. Madame Krakowski frequently saw them “visiting” me, but she was less strict and rigid than she had been at our previous home. Perhaps her relaxed attitude stemmed from the fact that there were fewer children, or that Le Couret was farther away from authorities, both the Vichy government and the OSE headquarters in Limoges.

One of the first things she did was to rent a small summerhouse for Sal, Lea and me. It was owned by a Limoges railroad worker and was a fifteen minute walk from the home. It could hardly be called a house. It was just a one-room hut, but it was ours. It gave us the luxury of privacy.

The shortage of food was even more acute than it had been in Montintin, and we relied on the good will of French farmers. One was a friendly young man, the only neighbor we had within two miles. That man made a habit of delivering extra milk and butter to me in the kitchen. And Monsieur Schlachter, a member of our Le Couret staff, spent most of his time going to farms further afield begging for extra milk, eggs, and butter to supplement the limited amount of food to which the Vichy rationing system entitled us. He had little or no money to pay the Frenchmen. I marveled constantly at Schlachter’s great powers of persuasion. He never came back empty-handed.

Schlachter returned from his rounds in the countryside one day carrying a small potbellied stove for my little shack. It was just large enough to hold one pot, but it provided heat and made it possible for me to do a little cooking once in a while. Walking from Le Couret to the summerhouse in the evening, I would carry some wet grounds of ersatz coffee I saved from the Le Couret kitchen. Sal collected dry wood along the way and lit a fire in the stove. I reused the grounds to make a second, but still drinkable brew of ersatz. With it we would eat a piece of bread, our ration that I had put aside during the day.

Rationing entitled us to a small amount of meat. Limoges was the only place for miles around where kosher meat was still available. Through the intervention of the Jewish community, Le Couret was allocated a share of it. The Jewish community also had the meat delivered to our kitchen two or three times a month. Most often, I received chopped meat, and this I stretched as much as I could. I found that chopped meat stretched furthest when I molded it into meat loaves. I served the meat loaf cold with potato salad.

It was not enough. And even with Schlachter’s successful forays, the food scarcely satisfied our growing children. Between meals, they came and pleaded for extra scraps. They would beg from Sal as well whenever they saw him, knowing he helped in the kitchen. They went to Schlachter and anyone else they thought had access to food. Relentlessly hungry, they scoured the forest for nuts and berries, until winter made it pointless.

I continued to struggle with tobinambour. Finally, I developed a recipe, cooking the vegetable with vinegar, oil, onion, sugar and salt. I had by no means made it into a delicacy, merely more edible to more people. Madame Weil, one of the OSE directors, tasted it when she visited our home and actually praised my tobinambour dish. She even asked for the recipe, so she could distribute it to the other OSE cooks.

They were all such good children and willingly helped with everything. Boys chopped wood for our stoves in the kitchen and the fireplaces. Among the vegetables available from local farms were carrots, so boys and girls would regularly sit at our long dining room tables, slicing carrots for one hundred people.

This building was probably more than one hundred years old. I knew it was at least seventy-five years old because I came upon a cache of magazines in the attic that dated back to the nineteenth century. There were beautiful drawings of clothes and furniture and houses from another era. How delightful to leaf through those magazines, to escape the life we were living: In wartime, in an old house, hidden away in the forest. How had those magazines come to be in the attic? Had they been carefully stored to save them, or carelessly tossed into the attic to get them out of the way? It did not matter. In the winter, when we ran out of toilet paper and paper for kindling our fires, we began burning the magazines. We needed the paper, and the record of nineteenth century life, preserved for more than seventy-five years in the attic of that isolated old house, disappeared.

Le Couret was so old that it had no indoor plumbing. A natural spring that ran past our home in the forest was our source of water for washing, cooking and drinking. The water was so sweet and refreshing that no one was ever thirsty for long. Still, it meant that the boys acquired yet another urgent task to be performed regularly—carrying water from the spring to the house. None of us, adults or children, had ever lived in such primitive conditions, but we accepted these circumstances without question or complaint.

Many times that winter, I thanked God that my friends from Leipzig had succeeded in emigrating to New York, for they took in my children. The two Graubart brothers each took one of the girls. Ruth went to live in Brooklyn with Fred, and Eva to Mount Vernon, New York, with Irving. Three months later, the girls were reunited when the Weinrauchs took both girls into their home in Washington Heights. Rosa and Meyer had lived across the street from us in Leipzig, and Meyer had been joint owner of my mother’s shoe store. The girls could not have been in better hands.

I was grateful but also thought it only right. Years before, when they were single and just starting out, the Graubert brothers and Meyer had boarded with my mother in her apartment in Nordstrasse. Now when my family was in need, it was time to return my mother’s generosity. It was only natural.

How great the difference between the lives of my Ruth and Eva and that of the children at Le Couret. In New York, after school my daughters read, studied, and played with friends. Here, the children were kept busy cutting wood, carrying water, picking fruit, helping in the kitchen, sewing, knitting and crocheting, keeping their rooms clean, and all these chores had to be performed before or after school.

Regular classes were held at Le Couret. Government officials responsible for supervising education sent several teachers to instruct the children in French, history, and geography. We also had our own OSE teachers. Madame Krakowski led several classes, and her husband, who like Sal, had no official standing at Le Couret, taught the children Hebrew and instructed them in davening.

One of the French teachers, Madame Paul, liked to take Lea aside and read her stories. Lea knew all the letters of her name and would look for L’s and E’s and A’s, asking, “What’s this one Madame Paul, what’s that one?” The teacher decided to teach Lea to read, and found an apt and willing pupil.

Madame Paul took Lea to the school in the village of La Jonchere. When she tried to enroll Lea, the teacher protested, “This child is not yet six.”

“Try her,” Madame Paul said. “She reads and adds.”

“No, bring her back next year,” the teacher said. “She’s too small and too young.”

Madame Paul then made her proposal. “Let her come on Monday. I’ll stay the day. If she can’t do the work, I’ll take her home.”

Lea became the star pupil in the one-room school. When visitors came, the teacher would show her off. “See this tiny child? She is only five-and-a-half years old, and she reads as well as my eight-year-olds. She was born in a foreign country, and she speaks perfect French.”

In March of 1942, Ruth wrote that Hannah and her family were in New York. Ruth made no mention of Edith. My oldest daughters’ letters had been exact and detailed. If Edith had been in New York, she would have mentioned it. That she hadn’t could mean only one thing. The visa Herman had secured did not include Edith, and she had been left behind. I did not blame Herman. A man should not have to throw away safety for his wife, daughter and mother. I could only hope there were Jews left in Villeneuve and that they were looking after my sister.

I had not heard from Papa in many months. I did not even know if he had managed to get away from Leipzig and out of Germany. Even if he were in a place from where he could write, how would he know where to send the letter? I thought of the day almost three years ago when I had said goodbye to him at the airport in Leipzig. I had been struck by the premonition that I would not see him again. That dark certainty had come from nowhere, and I felt it again when I heard Hannah had arrived in America and many times after.

We all worried about family members with whom we had lost touch. Our own future was uncertain. We had been elated when America entered the war in December 1941, but Hitler’s armies continued to advance in Russia.

In spite of our difficulties and concerns, we took pride in maintaining a superb, warm Jewish atmosphere at La Couret. This was a truly Jewish home. It was a place where children learned and where our isolation made it easy to keep Shabbos. Monsieur Krakowski led our Friday evening services. I can still hear the clear, fervent voices of the children in the dining room, singing Shalom Aleichem.

Shabbos was my favorite time. More than any other time before, it was a day of rest for