The Woman in the Photograph Read online

  Willy said that the excitement of living in Paris had worn thin, along with their reserve of cash, so Alice and Erika returned to Leipzig. They found circumstances were worse than when they left. Perhaps it was at this point that Rotholz entered the picture. Did he mean to offer strength and protection to Erika, or did he seize the opportunity to take advantage of a very attractive but lost young woman?

  I could see them staring at the Juden Verboten sign in the window of a café they once frequented, while further down the street they were denied entrance to the dressmaker’s shop. They would have felt the absence of many of their friends, including Fez and Willy. Others, whose families owned businesses and properties, were trying to stay where they were until the German people came to their senses and got rid of the crazy Führer. Many were convinced that the Germans were rational and would return to the rule of law. They decided to wait out the shocking changes rather than flee, leaving everything they had worked so hard for behind. For the girls, there was no question. There was nothing left to hold them. Perhaps that was their good fortune after all.

  17

  A Broken Thread

  In June 1992, we were notified that a real estate development company called Neue Leipziger had signed a provisional contract for the purchase of the Leipzig property. The fulfillment of that agreement was still conditional on our being able to prove that we were the rightful heirs. A month later I received a bound orange folder, twenty pages of German legal language with an official notarized seal, the Beglaubigte Abschrift (certified copy) from the notary in Berlin. The cover letter from the lawyer explained: “The situation remains unsettled but positive.” He also sent a chronological summary of the Leipzig property, just dates and property transfers, but as I read it, the human history rose up before me like a phoenix from the ashes.

  Dr. Max Lewin bought the building at 32 Grassistrasse on March 20, 1920. His dentistry office was doing well, and he wanted to provide his family with a home in the prestigious Music Quarter. When Erika and Alice were little, the spacious apartment with its tall ceilings and heavy doors seemed enormous. As they got older, it became darker and more confining. The heavy Persian rugs on the floor and gloomy oil paintings on the walls offered little comfort when Max was in a volatile mood.

  But Alice loved being outdoors in the green ocean of Leipzig’s parks, or running down the street on her way to school, the smack of her feet on the cobblestone streets and her shouts to Erika creating echoes that bounced from building to building. She dreaded the moment at the end of the day when they returned home and opened the front door, hoping her father would not be sitting in the dining room with a frown.

  This was also the apartment where as teenagers the girls dressed in their beautiful gowns for special occasions, where they brushed their hair and each helped the other with the clasp on a necklace or bracelet. It was here that Alice ran her hands over the soft ruffles of her evening dress as she prepared for a dinner that would take place after opening night of the Gewandhaus Orchestra.

  In October 1932, Max died of a heart attack. By January, Nelly lay critically injured in the hospital, and Hitler was Chancellor of Germany. Their privileged life, built on the solid stone of 32 Grassistrasse, had begun to crumble. On December 10, 1935, Alice and Erika were forced by the policy of Aryanization to sell the property at below its value to an Aryan buyer, Dr. Walther Brauer. At the time of the sale, Erika was married, and her husband, Dr. Ralph Rotholz, consented to the sale as required by German law.

  Immediately after the transaction was completed, Alice, Erika, and Ralph Rotholz fled to Palestine. The ruffled gowns, the sparkling necklaces and the memories were left behind, except for three trunks shipped to Nyack, New York.

  During World War II, the building was destroyed by bombing: Grundstück wurde im Krieg zerstört. On May 9, 1969, while Leipzig was under the domination of the Communist German Democratic Republic, Dr. Bauer sold the empty lot to the city of Leipzig. Nothing was ever built on it. In 1990, Tom and I presented our case as the legitimate heirs to the property, and in a sense, to its history.

  The next time I called Uncle Willy, I told him about the signing of the provisional contract. Since our meeting two months earlier, I had spoken to him on the phone several times, though not about the past. The conversations about my parents threatened to take away the fleeting positive impressions I had of their marriage, and—perhaps even more painful to me—exposed a judgmental side of Willy I didn’t want to focus on. The affection between us was a safe, cherished part of my childhood. For my own sake, I chose to be loyal, not just to Willy, but to the warmth and longevity of our relationship.

  Willy was stunned to hear about the contract. “You’re kidding!” he said several times, and he repeated that he had not expected anything to come of it. I told him it still wasn’t a sure thing. “Isn’t it amazing that something lost so long ago could be found again?” I marveled. He said he was happy, but I heard him clear his throat and pause before he spoke. I had a sense that the news confused and troubled him, though I didn’t press further.

  In September, my brother called to tell me that my uncle was in Mt. Sinai hospital in New York. The doctors didn’t know what was wrong, but he had stopped eating and was slipping in and out of consciousness. The news hit me hard. I was not willing to lose him without a farewell. I booked a flight to New York the next day.

  I took a taxi from the airport and went straight to the hospital. My uncle’s eyes were closed, but he opened them wide and said, “What are you doing here?” then dozed off again. During the two hours I stayed, he awakened again and we had a brief, tender conversation. The next day the nurse told me there was no medical diagnosis that required hospital treatment and he would go to a nursing home on Long Island to spend his last months near his daughters, both of whom were married and lived in the area. I offered to ride with him in the ambulance.

  Sitting on a bench in the back of the ambulance, my nerves felt prickly. It was hard to see my robust, assertive uncle so fragile, clothed in a hospital gown, strapped into a bed. I often got anxious riding in the back seat of a car and I had a surge of panic at the thought of the ambulance charging down the freeway, siren blaring to force other vehicles out of our path. To assuage my anxiety I started a conversation with the attendant sitting next to me. He assured me that this was not an emergency and they would drive at a normal speed without sirens. I continued to ask him questions, more to calm myself with the distraction than out of genuine curiosity.

  Suddenly Uncle Willy opened his eyes, turned his head toward me and said in a loud, irritated voice, “Can you please stop talking? Can’t a man get some rest?” He drifted right back to sleep but I felt the sting of his reprimand, like a child who had lost parental favor.

  I stayed a few days and visited him once he was settled in the nursing home. The time was precious to me because I was able to say good-bye in loving words I hadn’t had the chance to express to Dad, Mom, or Erika. A month after I left, Tom called to let me know that Uncle Willy was on the mend. A friendly Irish nurse had told him that if he was trying to find a way to die, not eating would take a very long time and it probably wasn’t the best method. Apparently she was persuasive because he started to eat again and was released a month later. When he moved back to Sarasota I called him in his new residence at a hotel overlooking the beach.

  “What happened?” I asked. “How did you get better?”

  “Food and friends,” he answered. “That’s what brought me back. Food and friends.”

  In January 1993 I received a letter from my uncle. “My life here is rather quiet and each day follows the other without excitement and without interest in the world’s daily rush,” he wrote. Two months later, March 19, 1993, he passed away.

  My Uncle Willy was the last to die among the adults I loved and considered my elders. I rarely saw Uncle Nathan after we moved out of the house in Queens, though I had visited him one last time when he was in his eighties. I went by the apartment on
West End Avenue in Manhattan where he and Aunt Pearl lived, a small, neatly furnished two-bedroom with walls lined with books. He didn’t have much to say, but when he took my hand, his eyes brimmed with tears, and I saw the tender, affectionate side of him, finally available once all the responsibilities of his adult years were behind him. He died soon after, and Aunt Pearl was moved to a nursing home. There was an entry in my mother’s date book on the day she died: “Visit Pearl at 4 p.m.” I wondered if anyone called Pearl to tell her that Alice wasn’t coming.

  Nathan and Pearl, Alice and Fez, Erika, and now Willy. I was grateful to Willy for breaking the long silence about the past. He was a living witness who provided a thread, albeit a tangled one, to connect me to my parents. With his death, the thread was broken, and I felt as though I lost all of them for good.

  18

  The Dinner Party

  The photo of Alice and Erika hung on my bedroom wall, calling to me from their private world. I continued to imagine scenes from their lives, but I didn’t know how to proceed in my quest. The only person who actually liked to talk about family was Lynne. I was no longer the little girl who climbed into the loft of her jewelry store to string beads. Even though she was twenty-four years older than me, we turned to each other to fill the void left by my mother’s death. Lynne wrote me notes in her flowing script with a flourish on the capital letters:

  I’m like you. I’m into Family with a capital “F.” Ours is so small. I like to keep it together as much as possible. Also like you, I am so anxious to know more of our history. Alice was my best bet and I guess I never leaned on her enough to tell me more. My father surely could have, but 30 years ago, I didn’t have that much of a drive for information. Even my mother could have helped, but here we are with little to go by.

  Lynne was still very busy designing jewelry for the business she developed with her sister Margie after she closed the little shop on Lexington Avenue, and she was also preoccupied with the declining health of her husband, Al. But finally, she found the time to dig out her collection of family photos. She wrote:

  I’m sending you some of my treasures. The top one is an afternoon in our backyard in Mt. Vernon in the months after your mother arrived. I thought your mother and father look so terrific here, you might want to have them lifted out into a beautiful picture of just the two of them.

  I loved the photo of Alice and Fez at Lynne’s parents’ home in Mt. Vernon. I could sense the touch of their bodies, his torso curved around hers, her head tipped toward his.

  The reunion photo arrived at the end of the week, Lynne’s careful script across the top: “Farewell dinner party for the American Lewins at the home of Max and Nelly, Leipzig 1927.” The setting was as she had described—a long, elegant table with placemats and fine glassware, though I hadn’t anticipated the number of people. I had always thought my mother had a small family, just Alice and Erika, and a boisterous older woman we called Tante Edith, whom I visited with my mother at her apartment in Manhattan on rare occasions or overheard Mom talking with on the phone. In the Leipzig dinner party photo, I counted thirty people, almost all my mother’s aunts, uncles, and cousins. Lynne included a photocopy with a number over each person’s image corresponding to his or her name at the bottom.

  It was strange to see this large, prosperous, multi-generational family—my family—yet they were complete strangers to me. The men wore formal tuxedos with black bow ties, many sporting the short mustache that made them look like Hitler. It was disconcerting to see my Jewish ancestors mirroring a style I associated with the Führer. Nelly and Lillian, Lynne’s mother, were elegant in straight, glittery dresses, the vogue of the twenties. Alice and Erika, with their bobbed hair and matching checkered dresses, looked like the schoolgirls that they were, Alice thirteen and Erika fifteen. None of them could have imagined that their future was so precarious.

  “How in the world do you remember people you met once when you were six years old?” I asked Lynne, incredulous, when I reached her that evening.

  “Dad used to talk about his siblings and point them out to me. There were three brothers—Max, (your grandfather), George, and my father, Curtis—and four sisters: Meta, Selma, Paula, and Ellie. I saw some of them again when I was older,” she explained. “Aunt Paula came here in the thirties and my father tried to convince her to stay, but she went back to Germany, where her husband was buried. Unfortunately, she ended up in Theresienstadt, where she was blinded and died. The only siblings who survived were Ellie and her husband, who got to Palestine with plenty of their own money and lots of your mother’s and Erika’s too—I told you the story of the dead cows. Also Uncle George with his wife Ruth and two daughters who Dad brought to New York.”

  Lynne’s warm voice masked the gravity of her words. I registered that my mother’s Aunt Paula was blinded at Theresienstadt. I had heard of the concentration camp in what was then Czechoslovakia, and remembered some scenes from a TV miniseries, The Winds of War. The Nazis misrepresented the camp to the Red Cross and the world as a model Jewish community with healthy conditions and cultural activities, while behind the scenes it was a death camp and a transport point on the way to Auschwitz.

  “My father wanted all his siblings to come to New York, but they had other considerations and stayed in Germany until it was too late,” Lynne explained. “Selma and Meta and their husbands, both university professors, perished in the camps. Selma’s daughter Ilsa, the smiling young woman on the far right, escaped to Paris with a Christian family, but got turned in by someone and was later dragged back and killed in the gas chambers. Her brother Werner survived and became a great friend to your mother until he died in Israel twenty years ago.”

  I recalled having heard the name Werner from my mother but I’d never met him. It seemed as though my mother had two separate lives that didn’t cross paths. I hadn’t taken any interest in her other life until after she was dead, and now I grasped at every scrap of information as though I needed to reclaim the missing pieces to make my life whole.

  But it wasn’t easy to digest. Two sisters in fancy gowns who lost a lot of money was one thing, but it was another to hear that my close relatives died in the gas chambers or were among the piles of dead bodies in World War II newsreels. I didn’t want to associate members of my family with the concentration camp victims. It had been more comforting to say, “My parents were lucky they got out so early.”

  I looked back at the photo and stared at each face as though I could squeeze some answer from the picture. Selma, with her hands crossed on her ample lap and the hint of a smile on her lips looked like a warm, motherly figure. I imagined she would have fared well in the role she expected, but her kindness couldn’t save her from conditions no one had ever imagined. Were the people who survived more resilient, more resourceful, or just lucky, I wondered.

  When a friend asked me if I was becoming obsessive, I had to laugh. That was an understatement. I was having imaginary relationships with people I didn’t know, filling an inner void with relatives and ancestors. Was it a way to put some ground beneath my feet? I was beginning to accept that I didn’t spring from a vacuum, and I wanted to understand the forces that shaped me, especially the ones nobody talked about.

  My old friend knew me back when I was a rebel who rejected all family traditions and didn’t want any part of my mother’s inheritance—not even her enameled spoons. I escaped to college and told my roommate that I was the apple who wanted nothing to do with the family tree. Yet now I found myself not only looking for the tree but determined to dig up the roots too, if that’s what it took to piece together my ancestry. How naïve I was to think I could slip away unscathed. I didn’t understand how much the unknown past was woven into my beliefs and expectations. I wondered whether there was anything else to find and if there was, what difference it would make.

  Not long afterwards I had an opportunity to take another look at the truth. I was visiting a nursing home with a friend, and the conversation turned to my family r
esearch project.

  “I have a book,” my friend’s mother, Hilda, said, “that has the records of every German citizen killed in the camps by the Nazis. They were meticulous record keepers.”

  I looked at the frail woman, sitting in her wheelchair and leaning slightly to the right to compensate for her painful hip joint. Her comment startled me. Without changing her tone of voice, Hilda leaned forward to bring her face closer to mine and put her hand firmly on my arm.

  “Do you want to see it?” she asked, tipping her face upward so I was forced to look directly into her eyes. “You don’t have to.”

  I paused before responding. “Yes. Yes, I do want to see the book,” I finally answered.

  We went back to Hilda’s room to get the book. My friend pushed the wheelchair down the hall as I walked next to her mother. She told us that her family was very active in the Jewish community in Frankfurt, and she used to go to the train station to see people off when they left for Palestine.

  “We were teenagers and had a strong bond through Jewish clubs and associations; we were full of hope and idealism. We sang Zionist songs to celebrate those who were going to the ‘promised land,’ though we didn’t know if we would ever see them again.

  “I didn’t get to Israel until a few years ago. That’s where I bought this book.”

  With her daughter’s help, Hilda went to the closet and got out a heavy bound book with a navy blue cover, about ten inches by eight inches. The title read: Gedenkbuch Berlins der Jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus, The Berlin Remembrance Book of the Jewish Victims of National Socialism. It was published in Berlin and documented German Jews from the Berlin area.

  “I met a cab driver when I was in Israel who told me about this book,” she explained. She paused. “I bought a copy for each of my siblings. The book was expensive.” [4]