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

Sal. His passport is good. Could there be some new regulations we haven’t heard about?”

Sal was visibly alarmed. “I don’t like it,” he said. “There is no reason for the police to take him.”

“Sal, I have to go up. I left Lea alone,” I said.

I climbed the three flights of stairs, counting the steps to avoid thinking. Back in the kitchen, I tried to beat the lumps out of the cake batter. Too much time had passed since I had added the flour. I poured the spoiled mixture down the sink and scrubbed the bowl and the greased cake pans.

Lea was awake and thumping her little feet against the crib. I lifted her out and let her play. She placed two dolls next to her on the floor, found a book, and pretended to read it to them.

It was not yet six o’clock when Sal came home. “I closed early,” he said.

“Where is Opa?” Eva asked. “I learned how to write another Hebrew letter.”

“He will be here in a little while,” I said. “You set the table for supper.”

We finished our meal at six-thirty, and Markus had still not come home.

“Opa’s not here. Where is Opa?” Eva wanted to know.

“Go play in your room. Ruth, you go with her.”

Sal kept pulling his gold watch out of his vest pocket to check the time. “It’s been over three hours. Why would they want a retired eighty-year-old man?”

I tried to picture Markus at the police headquarters. Then it occurred to me that Moritz lived near the main police building. “Maybe he went to Moritz,” I said.

“Yes, that may be it,” said Sal, with hope in his voice. “One of the Gestapo hinted that the business might take a little longer than an hour. My father might have become too tired to make the trip back to the Reilstrasse. I’m going to ride over to my brother’s house to see.”

Two hours later, Sal returned, distressed and alone.

He had clung to the hope of finding Markus until he reached his brother’s home. Moritz opened the door and said one word. “Papa?”

“Isn’t he here?” Sal asked, even though he already knew the answer.

Moritz’s small apartment was crowded with anxious Jews, talking in hushed tones. Sal heard snatches of comments. “Goldberg was arrested in the lobby of his building… They took my sister… The Friedmans, all of them, even the old mother.”

Sal learned that Jews were making hurried, furtive visits to each other’s homes. The few who had telephones exchanged news with friends and relatives in Leipzig, Berlin, and Hamburg. The message passed among Jews was the same all over Germany: “Hide.”

Young and old, men, women and children, shopkeepers and teachers had been arrested. Someone came to tell Moritz that his sisters, Fanny and Malia, and their children were among those rounded up that afternoon.

“I’m sorry I left you alone so long,” Sal said to me. “But we were trying to find a reason for the arrests. The common denominator was that all the Jews who were arrested had Polish passports. It means not only Jews born in Poland but also Jews of Polish descent. Anyone who did not become a German citizen.”

I understood the implication at once. Sal and I had been left alone because we were naturalized German citizens. This we had done years before Hitler came into power. My father had taken steps with us. But Sal and Moritz were the only Kanners who had become naturalized citizens.

What would happen to Markus and all the others? There seemed nothing that we could do, absolutely nothing. I felt utterly helpless.

At eleven o’clock that night, a voice calling “Sal!” drew us to the front door. When we opened it, Heinrich Padaver stumbled into my apartment and fell into my husband’s arms. Sal led his cousin into the living room. Heinrich was shaking, and the color had drained from his face.

“They took my wife and the children while I was away,” he said. “The Gestapo came for them fifteen minutes before I came home. A neighbor told me when I got to the lobby. I was afraid to go up to our apartment. I’ve been to Geminder’s house, and they’re gone, too. Thank God I found you. I don’t know what to do.”

Sal answered at once. “Stay with us, Heinrich. The Nazis are only after Polish Jews, so they won’t come here.”

“No, no, I think I should be with my family.” He covered his eyes and wept, his hoarse, gasping sobs sending shivers through my body.

“If you’re free, maybe you can do something for them, but you must calm yourself,” Sal argued. “Please, go wash up. Mia will bring you some hot tea.”

Heinrich did quiet down. He even ate a little. “Thank you,” he said. “I haven’t eaten anything since noon. My head is clear now, and I’ve decided. Whatever happens, I have to be with my family.”

We pleaded with him, but he barely listened to us. At midnight, he embraced his cousin. “God will be with us. We are His people,” he said. Then he left for police headquarters and gave himself up to the Gestapo.

Early on the morning of our eldest daughter’s ninth birthday, I packed Markus’ tallis and tefillin, his siddurim, his medicine, and warm clothes. Sal took the box downtown, to police headquarters. He returned an hour later, still carrying the box.

“It was too late,” Sal said. “A guard stopped me at the entrance and asked me where I was going. I told him I had a package for my father who was very old. I told the guard to open the box to prove it held only clothes, medicine and his tallis. He said, ‘Your father is not here anymore. We sent the Jews back to Poland on a pre-dawn train, all two hundred of them.’”

News of the deportations spread rapidly among the four hundred Jews left in Halle. We learned that none of the Jews had been permitted to take anything along. The police sealed their apartments, and everything remained as it had been at the instant when the Gestapo had knocked on the doors. Schoolbooks were left open on the table. Half-mended socks lay on top of the sewing basket.

Heinrich Padaver’s wife had been preparing fish for Shabbos when the police came to her home. The raw carp remained on the cutting board in her kitchen. After a while, the fish began to smell. We found out when neighbors complained of the stink from the Jew’s apartment, and the police sent someone to remove the rotting fish.

The arrests continued throughout Germany for three days. The roundup was a step in the effort to make the nation Judenrein. Fifty thousand Jews were seized and deported to the German-Polish border. At the border, they were ordered out of the trains. They were separated according to their area of origins so that they could be returned to the cities and villages of their parents’ or ancestors’ birth.

On the second day, the Polish government protested the return of thousands of people for whom there was no work, housing and insufficient food. On the third day, the Poles closed their border. Hitler’s government was unprepared for Warsaw’s action, but Poland stood firm. In March of 1938, Poland had passed a decree, stripping citizenship from any Pole who had lived outside the country for more than five years. The only way to circumvent this action had been to secure a special passport stamp from the Polish Consulate. Few Jews living in Germany had bothered, and those who did seek the stamp were often turned away by the Polish Consuls in Germany.

After the third day, as the Poles stood by their refusal to take the Jews, Germany permitted those who had not crossed over to return to their homes.

Sal’s sister Fanny and her younger daughter Hanni were among those who came back. They arrived at our apartment late in the afternoon, exhausted from their harrowing journey, and told how it had been at the border. There was chaos as officials tried to separate Jews and route them to different parts of Poland.

“It was terrible,” Hanni said. “It was cold. There was no food. There was no water. There were no toilets.”

Fanny said, “I never saw Papa after we left the Halle station. We were put on different trains. We looked and looked, but the crowd was huge at the border. People were pushing and shoving, and we couldn’t find him. And then we lost Roschen.”

Fanny wept as she recounted how she had become separated from her twenty-five-year-old daughter. “Roschen had kept repeating, ‘I want to go. I don’t want to be on German soil.’ When Roschen heard the name of her father’s birthplace over the loudspeaker, she ran for the train. She must have thought Hanni and I were right behind her. I don’t know how she ever made it through the mob. I couldn’t. I kept calling her name. Then I saw her for a moment at a half-open window as the train pulled away.”

Fanny and her daughter spent the night at our apartment. I urged them to remain, but they asked Sal to take them home.

In the days that followed, we clung desperately to our daily routine: I cooked and kept the house in order; the children went to school; and Sal sat in the store, waiting for customers. We hoped for news that did not come. No other member of Sal’s family came back from Poland. We wondered if Markus had reached Mielec, the Galician village where his stepsister still lived. Sal found her address among his father’s papers and sent a letter and money.

“I should have insisted that Papa become a German citizen,” Sal said in the days that followed the deportation. “When I did it in 1920, I told him that Germany was my home and my country. He said ‘Yes, yes, mine too, but I don’t need a piece of paper to prove it.’”

On November 8, 1938, the German radio reported an alarming story that involved a seventeen-year-old Jewish student named Herschl Grynspan, whose parents had been sent back to Poland. The previous day, Grynspan had walked into the German Embassy in Paris and shot Embassy third Secretary Ernst Von Rath. On our radio, we heard a barrage of anti-Semitic abuse. Newspapers joined in, railing against the Jews.

It no longer required a Nazi demonstration to make me nervous when I went outside. I was tense when I left the apartment that day and the next. I constantly looked over my shoulder. I was nervous in the street even if I did not see a single Nazi. Then, on November 9, Von Rath died.