The Woman in the Photograph Read online

  “I had no idea,” I said, touched by the poignancy of Tom’s situation.

  “What did you do?”

  “Neither of them reached out to me. No one touched me. I just turned around in a daze and went back up to my room.”

  My brother’s gray-green eyes, so like my father’s, looked moist, and I noticed the flecks of light in them. I didn’t know if I had upset him, but I needed more. I had returned from Erika and Willy’s to a cold, empty house with no transition and no understanding of what happened.

  “Was there a funeral?”

  “Yes. We all drove to the Montefiori cemetery in Queens. In those days the men cut their ties as a sign of mourning. I guess that was a version of tearing your clothes. I remember that Mom was very upset and didn’t want me to cut my tie. She had an argument with Nathan, and insisted on leaving my tie alone.”

  “Did you?”

  “Of course. Mom got her way.”

  “Who came?”

  “It’s hard for me to remember the details. I was in shock. I think Cousin Lynne, her husband Al, and her sister Margie. Of course, Nathan and Pearl, and Bill and Erika, were there. Later we went back to the house to sit shiva. More people arrived as the day wore on, the Schweizers, Ilsa Maleniak, even a couple of people from Trylon Realty. You know, their friends from Germany were very loyal. Mom and Dad were the same way. They would always go if someone died or someone was sick. People told stories and we laughed. The adults were very nice to me, and there was lots of food and soda. But I felt bad enjoying myself because it didn’t seem right. When everyone left, the house got deadly quiet.”

  “I wish I could have had a chance to be with all those people and talk about Daddy.”

  “I know. I don’t know why they didn’t let you come, but that’s the way they did everything. When Opa died, I was ten and away in summer camp. They didn’t tell me. I got home at the end of summer and ran upstairs to his room on the top floor to see him and Mom said, ‘You don’t have to visit him—he died.’ I had a shaky feeling, like, what do I do now?”

  “Did you ever talk to anyone about Daddy?”

  “Not really. Maybe Bill mentioned him once. It was difficult to go back to school the next week as though nothing had happened. Mom wrote a note to explain I missed a day of school because my father had died. What could I say? I felt numb. After Daddy died, the lights went out.”

  Tom and I sat quietly watching the sun peak in and out from the drifting fog. I put my hand on his shoulder, grateful for a feeling of tenderness we had not shared in a long time.

  On January 17, 1997, four months after I submitted my claim, a new discovery shook up the Swiss Banking scandal. The New York Times reported that Christoph Meili, a night watchman at the Union Bank of Switzerland, had found two large bins full of documents waiting to be shredded.

  The contents were unmistakably old and they were a jumble: from oversized ledger books with entries handwritten in fountain pen, to decades old contracts, to lists of mortgaged buildings in German cities like Berlin and Breslau in the 1930’s and 1940’s—the years of Nazi rule in Germany.

  Mr. Meili made a fateful decision that he knew would probably cost him his job: he grabbed an armful of books and papers, took them to a Jewish cultural organization the next day and then went public with what he knew…

  Mr. Meili’s action rocked U.B.S., Switzerland’s biggest bank, which acknowledged on Tuesday that it had made a “deplorable mistake” and may have violated a new Swiss law created to protect material that might shed light on the Holocaust.[7]

  As I read the article, my throat tightened. I saw a mountain of precious financial records, including Max Lewin’s bank account, shredded and ragged, like the newspapers we tore into strips to make papier-mâché masks in elementary school.

  The next month I found a letter from the Contact Office of the Swiss Banks in Zurich in the mailbox. This was the response I had waited for over the last five months, and I savored the rush of possibilities it might offer, dreams that ranged from simple peace of mind to buying a home of our own. I held the envelope next to my heart before carefully sliding my letter opener along the edge.

  February 10, 1997

  Dear Madam,

  We must unfortunately now inform that no positive reports were received from any of the banks applied to. This indicates that no dormant accounts (accounts, custody accounts or safe deposit boxes) are held in any Swiss bank under any of the names or designations cited by you.

  It only remains for us to assure you that the enquiry was treated with the utmost diligence. We regret that we are unable to give you a more satisfactory reply.

  Yours faithfully,

  Contact Office of the Swiss Banks

  “No!” I screamed to the empty hallway. I screamed for Mom teaching herself shorthand in the New York city rush hour, for Nelly feeling so destitute she couldn’t even face her two daughters, and for myself, daring to dream of something beyond my normal expectations.

  “We know it was there,” Lynne said emphatically, when I called her with the disappointing news. “Hire a lawyer,” she said. “Don’t give up.”

  “Oh, Lynne, I’m afraid my cows died!”

  I couldn’t see the point in hiring a lawyer, but at least I knew I wasn’t alone in sifting through the ashes of the Holocaust. The paper was full of articles about individuals, organizations, and world leaders who were actively engaged in sorting out the truth about the disposition of Jewish assets, the handling of dormant accounts, and the sale of unclaimed treasures such as art and jewelry.

  Later that year, on July 23 (coincidentally my mother’s birthday), I spread out the New York Times on my kitchen table:

  Swiss Find More Bank Accounts From the War and Publish List

  Under mounting international pressure, Switzerland’s major banks are publishing a list today of roughly 2,000 dormant World War II-era accounts that may include the assets of Holocaust victims. The list names more than twice the number of such accounts that the banks said they had identified as recently as 1996.[8]

  It was shocking to see how many names were on the list, how many people never returned to claim their accounts. I scrolled down the list to Levy…Levy…Lewin. This time Max Lewin was on the list.

  I decided to call our local newspaper. The Contra Costa Times published an article with the headline “Grandfather’s Swiss Bank Account Opens Past for Berkeley Woman” [9] and soon after I got a call from a local TV station. A reporter came to our house and took close-up shots of the New York Times list and the precious photo of Alice and Erika sitting together on the loveseat.

  As Michael and I watched my story on the evening news, I felt exposed and vulnerable. More like my mother than I would like to admit, I have always been alert to any sign of threat or aggression. I suspected that this was more than just my natural temperament, that it had a connection to being Jewish, in particular German Jewish. I observed that Jewish friends whose parents and grandparents were born in America didn’t share my paranoia. But this time I was willing to be public, to stand up for the relatives who weren’t here to speak for themselves.

  As I filled out the required application for a second time, I thought of my mother’s resilience despite her losses. I remembered her doing jewelry repairs for Lynne, sitting at the kitchen table in the evening with a bright lamp focused on a square of dark blue quilted cloth. She laid a row of pearls out on the fabric, organized by size, smallest to largest and back to smallest. Slipping the needle and thread through the tiny hole, she flipped the necklace in a graceful gesture that formed a knot between each pearl. Then she pulled the knot tight between her thumb and index finger to produce a perfectly spaced strand of cultured pearls.

  I pictured my mother’s face in the glow of the lamp, the furrow of her brow as she concentrated all her attention on her work. Now it was my turn to string the pearls of her life story—to lay them out in chronological order and knot them back together in a perfect strand.

  21
/>
  The Settlement

  A month after I submitted my second application, the Contact Office of Swiss Banks informed me that my claim was once again denied “on the grounds that the Claimant’s grandfather was already dead at the time the account was opened.”

  This namesake is a coincidence, as there is no concurrence of other data provided by you.

  The Jewish Bulletin included my experience in an article about the frustrating hunt for names on the Swiss list,[10] and I was still convinced there was a bank account, but I thought of the shredded documents and didn’t have the heart or the will to proceed. Fortunately, some other good news drew my attention.

  In September 1997, our lawyer, Mr. Osen, wrote, “The Restitution Authority has issued a preliminary decision awarding reconveyance of the Leipzig property to you.” It was seven years since October 1990, when our claim had been filed for possession of 32 Grassistrasse. But Osen added that after the huge infusion of money from the German government ceased, unemployment, business collapse, and the exodus of people who relocated to the west reduced the property values in the former East Germany. Neue Leipziger, the development company that had contracted to buy the land, wanted to renegotiate the original purchase agreement. The lawyer proposed a reasonable settlement, and my brother and I agreed to accept the revised terms. It was only a matter of accounting before he would send us our share of the money from the sale.

  The news came as I was leaving for Florida to visit Tom and Harriet and to promote my new book, Journey from Anxiety to Freedom. In this self-help book, I chronicled the lives of eight different people, including myself, who had struggled with panic attacks and anxiety issues. The book described the different paths each of us followed to regain our confidence.

  Just before we left for my book signing, Mr. Osen called Tom and said that he was ready to mail our checks from the sale of the property. Instead of sending mine to California, we asked him to send both checks to Florida. Seventy years after our family’s property was taken away by Aryanization, Tom and I would be together to receive the restitution payment. What could be more auspicious? I thought.

  Liberties Bookstore in Boca Raton was unusually crowded for a Monday night. When I stepped up to the podium, I looked out at an audience that included my niece and nephews and their friends. Their attentive faces encouraged me, and I talked about my own story, admitting that even though I had been very adventurous in the past, when I started having panic attacks my life shrunk. Normal activities like freeway driving and flying became so filled with dread that I had stopped going anywhere, until I learned how to use relaxation, meditation, and new ways of thinking to reclaim my life.

  “The plane trip to New York when my mother lay in a coma, dying, was the first time I flew in six years,” I told the audience. I looked toward my brother, and was tempted to say that once again I had come east for a significant, life-changing event, but something held me back.

  The next day the doorbell rang, and the postman asked my brother to sign for a registered letter. What a mundane activity it seemed compared to the mixture of emotions it stirred in me: awe, gratitude, and sadness that my mother wasn’t with us. I wanted to see her face light up, to hear her breathe a deep sigh of relief and say that life was good and we could all be happy.

  “Let’s see what we have here,” Tom said cheerfully. He opened the envelope, handed me a check made out in my name and walked over to the kitchen counter where he picked up his car keys.

  I could feel my face flush.

  “Wait a minute,” I called out. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going to deposit my check,” he said.

  It took me a second to find my voice.

  “Wait. You can’t—Tom, don’t go so fast. This isn’t just money. This is a miracle. I need to mark this moment, to acknowledge how this came about.”

  Tom stopped moving. Harriet and Michael walked toward us, but neither of them spoke. I could feel Michael’s presence hovering by my side, and I had a sense that he was holding his breath.

  My brother didn’t view this as a sacred occasion. His relationship with Mom was different from mine, tainted with hurt and disappointment that he wanted to put behind him. His priority was to meet his son, who worked at a brokerage house, and deposit the check in his account. He turned to me, and asked, “What do you want?”

  What I wanted most at that moment was to run away. I asked Michael to come outside with me. The warm, humid breeze on my bare arm felt unfamiliar in the middle of November. I felt out of time, out of place, out of step with myself.

  A thread of history pulled me back to Alice and Erika visiting their mother in the hospital, to Erika’s husband giving his official approval for the sale of the apartment building that had been the girls’ home, two young women packing up remnants of their past and boarding a train, then a ship to go to Palestine to collect the money for their cows- a transaction that was supposed to give them the resources to start a new life in America.

  “Try not to get too upset. He doesn’t really understand what this means to you.”

  I heard Michael’s voice and felt his arm around me. I exhaled, a long sigh as though I hadn’t breathed in months.

  “How can it matter so little to Tom?” I said. “I thought we would both be affected, that it would be some kind of epiphany and bring us closer together.”

  When we got back to the house, Tom asked if I wanted some lunch. He looked sad and I knew that he didn’t want to hurt me. I wasn’t hungry but I drank two huge glasses of water. Tom sat on the living room couch and said we could do whatever I wanted. I asked Harriet if she had some candles.

  I looked around the room, a living space designed for a hot climate with cool, white tile floors and sparse furniture, set against Tom’s colorful oil paintings on every wall. I recognized the familiar Parisian street scene that had hung in their house in New York.

  I put four candles in glass holders on a glass table in front of the couch and asked if we could close our eyes and consider the significance of the occasion. Then I lit one candle in honor of Alice, one in honor of Erika, and two to represent our ancestors, known and unknown. I said that the roots of continuity had been severed, and the restitution from our grandparents’ home gave us the chance to weave the generations together again.

  I imagined my mother’s spirit there with us. I had a familiar impulse to soothe my mother, to hold her in my arms and tell her that everything was all right, to be the daughter she addressed in her final note, telling me that she knew I would always take care of her and protect her from evil. But I couldn’t make anything happen. I couldn’t make her feel safe or convince her to trust life. I wondered if I could still change some of my own patterns of anxiety and distrust. Could restitution of money transform an inherited pattern of insecurity? Could it change the beliefs I passed on to my own daughter?

  I blew out the candles.

  Harriet said, “Thank you, that was very nice.” Then we went in different directions for the rest of the afternoon. Michael and I took a walk on the beach. Later we all sat around the kitchen table and had pasta and salad. We were polite to each other, but I had a bitter taste in my mouth.

  That night I barely slept, my rest interrupted by unfamiliar emotions. I was Nelly, enraged at a husband who abandoned her to the Nazis, and Alice, angry at a father who hurt her and a husband who had died and left her alone again. I was every Jewish woman who heard an insistent knock on her door and opened it to find an armed agent of the secret police, the Gestapo, looking for her husband or father. The conclusion I had longed for with such high hopes had arrived, and I wanted to cry.

  The night after we returned to San Francisco, I had a dream. The main character was a little boy, but the minute I woke up I knew he was part of me. We had traveled to the Far East, an austere mountain landscape that reminded me of the Himalayas. We were going to see the Master, an old, wise teacher. When we arrived, he handed me a large chocolate bar. “You see,” he said, “it c
annot be lost. I have always kept it for you.”

  I understood. It was my inheritance. It was my family legacy. I remembered Uncle Nathan giving me a square of dark, bittersweet chocolate before I went to bed each night. I jumped out of bed and pulled open the curtains to a brilliant blue sky.

  Alice and Erika three and five Leipzig 1917

  Alice and Erika, ten and twelve, Leipzig 1924

  Erika and Alice fifteen and seventeen, S.S. Bremen 1929

  Alice and Erika, seventeen and nineteen, Oberhof 1932

  Max and Nelly, Karlsbad 1932

  Lewin Family Reunion, Leipzig 1927.

  Lynne is third child from left.

  Alice and Fez New York 1936

  Alice and Fez, Coney Island 1936

  Searching at the New Cemetery, Leipzig 2005

  Mani at the gravestone of Max and Nelly Lewin, Leipzig 2005

  PART THREE

  Renewal

  What is the thread that holds it all together? Grief, I thought for a while. And grief is there sure enough… But grief is not a force and has no power to hold… Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or mostly there in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.

  Hannah Coulter by WENDELL BERRY

  22

  A New home

  For two years, the settlement money sat in our savings account. We bought a few new things, a couch and loveseat, a used Jeep Cherokee, but on the surface, life continued as it had been before. However, inside I felt like I had entered a completely new realm. I had a sense of security that was unfamiliar, as though a missing piece of myself had been restored and my feet landed more solidly on the ground. My new roots gave me strength.