The Woman in the Photograph Read online

  I looked with awe at the clean, carefully typeset volume. Each entry listed a person by last and first name, sometimes also with maiden name, date and place of birth, date and place of deportation, date and place of death, if known.

  I turned the glossy white pages of the Gedenkbuch, the Book of Remembrance, to the H section for Selma’s married name, Hamburger. The reality of finding her name shocked me. I didn’t really expect it to be there.

  Hamburger, Selma, geborene Lewin.

  Geboren am 04. Oktober 1872 in Glogau.

  Deportationsziel: 15. Juni 1942,

  Sobibor Vernichtungslager.

  Hamburger, Selma, born Lewin.

  Born on October 4, 1872, in Glogau.

  Deportation destination: June 15, 1942,

  Sobibor extermination camp.

  A face in a family reunion photo and a few lines of print were all I could find of my great aunt, who grew up in a wealthy, educated family, married a university professor, and had two children. But it was important-a record that Selma Lewin Hamburger’s life had existed, and her death.

  The listing affected me more than I would have anticipated. I had heard the statistics, six million Jews murdered; but one notation in a commemorative book forced me to picture a woman’s journey from a life of comfort and safety to Bendorf-Sayn, an asylum where Jews were imprisoned, then a transport train to Sobibor, an extermination facility.

  I could barely sleep that night. I tossed and turned and had terrible dreams that I couldn’t reconstruct in the morning. But I did remember a meditation retreat we had attended with a Vietnamese Buddhist teacher named Thich Nhat Hanh. A student asked him if he gave money to beggars and homeless people. His answer was that he did not choose to give them money, but he did look into their eyes, “I look at them with compassion. I do not avert my eyes from their suffering,” he said.

  The photograph of the Lewin dinner party and the Book of Remembrance had opened a walled place in me. The way I tried to explain it to Michael was: “I can no longer avert my eyes.”

  19

  The Swiss Account

  Two more years passed after Uncle Willy’s death, and I felt like the trail to my mother’s past had grown cold again. Then on the night of June 21, 1995, the phone rang just as we were getting ready for bed.

  “Lynne? Is that you?” I looked at my watch and saw it was past midnight in New York. “Why are you still up at this hour?”

  “Al was reading the Wall Street Journal in bed and saw an article about the Swiss bank accounts. There’s pressure on the Swiss government to look into accounts that were never claimed, like your grandfather’s.”

  My heart beat faster. “That’s crazy. Why is it coming up now, after so long?”

  “They call them dormant accounts. Just get the paper,” she said.

  “I’ll get it in the morning. I can’t even imagine…”

  The next morning I bought the Wall Street Journal and read the article:[5]

  Secret Legacies

  Heirs of Nazis’ Victims Challenge Swiss Banks Over Deposits from World War II Era

  For 50 years, since the end of the war, banks here have cast a dismissive blanket of silence over the question of what they did with accounts opened by Jews and others who were then persecuted, and often murdered, by the Nazis…

  For Jews to smuggle possessions out of Nazi Germany was both illegal and extremely dangerous. Those who did often gave banks false names, used numbered accounts to disguise their identities or found others to deposit the money for them…

  Anyone turning up at a bank with documentary evidence should have no trouble claiming the money, providing that person can prove he or she is the rightful heir. But frequently there simply is no documentation. Some of the unclaimed money falls under the category of “heirless assets,” because it belonged to people whose entire families were wiped out. But even when relatives survived, they often don’t know which bank was used. They may only have sketchy anecdotal evidence that there is an account at all. As Mr. Levinsky, the Jewish activist, says bitterly: “You didn’t take your bank details to Auschwitz and out again.” As a result, some of those petitioning the banks have little to go by, their letters providing at most sad personal testimony to the atrocities of the age.

  So many people lost far more than my mother. She was one of the lucky ones. Yet I had never acknowledged the value of her paltry treasures—enameled teaspoons, a silver vase, a gold chain that had once been her father’s watch fob. I was beginning to understand why someone would cling to an old necklace, a piece of tarnished silver, or the belief in a vanished bank account—the only markers of a lost life.

  “I need to pursue this,” I said to Michael. “It would be a way to prove that her belief was right, not about the honesty of the Swiss, but in her certainty that her father’s bank account still existed. I have a copy of a letter that my mother wrote in 1953 claiming that her father deposited his money in a bank in either Geneva or Lausanne. Can you imagine what was going through her mind?”

  In the first years after Alice came to America, the traumas of the past must have paled in comparison to the promise of a bright future. But my father’s death shook loose the debris of all that had been destroyed. I saw my mother at the age of thirty-nine, looking around our house and seeing how drab it had become, how threadbare the Persian rugs she’d shipped from Germany in the first trunk Lynne’s father picked up, how dull the worn tweed slipcover on the couch. I could imagine her clenching her jaw to hold back the tears of rage, the memories of wealth that dissolved into ash like the books burned in the square in Leipzig, and the precious savings she concealed on her person as she crossed the border into Palestine, now all used up, with nothing to fall back on. It was at this juncture that she made a renewed effort to find the Swiss bank account.

  “I used to have a poster of a painting by Diego Rivera, The Flower Carrier,” I said to Michael. “You know it, the one where the peasant in the picture is bent over with the weight of the large basket bound to his back? His basket was supposedly filled with flowers but you can feel the burden of the pain he carries on his shoulders. That’s how I feel. I thought that because I was born in America, I wasn’t really affected by the persecution of the Jews or whatever happened to my relatives—not personally—but I was wrong. I do carry the weight of what occurred before I was born.”

  “That’s a lot to take on,” Michael said. He meant to be sympathetic, but it also confused him that I was suddenly so absorbed with the issue of my Jewish responsibility.

  I could see his perspective. The religion of my childhood had offered little solace in my younger life, and except for attending several bar mitzvah rituals, I had not participated in anything that had to do with the Judaism in all the time Michael knew me. If someone asked me what religion I was, I often said, “My parents were Jewish,” to separate myself and make clear that I had chosen a different path.

  But the issue of Holocaust-era Swiss bank accounts reminded me that I was part of a Jewish community that was bigger than just my immediate family, even if I was not observant of the religious traditions. Whether I called myself Jewish, Buddhist, American, or Californian, I saw this search for truth as part of my heritage.

  In April 1996, New York Senator Alfonse D’Amato, chair of the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, started hearings in the Senate to put pressure on the Swiss Banking Association to establish a central information department to review and respond to claims for “dormant, heirless assets.” In May, the Independent Committee of Eminent Persons, also known as the Volcker Commission, was created by an agreement between the Swiss Banking Association, the World Jewish Restitution Organization, and the World Jewish Congress.

  I was stunned by the steady stream of articles about the role of Swiss banks in relation to the Nazis. The Swiss were not just “lucky” that Hitler didn’t invade their “neutral” country. In fact, new information revealed that the Swiss sheltered gold and wealth stolen by the
Nazis, and profited after the war by keeping unclaimed assets that were not necessarily heirless at all. By October 1996, twelve thousand Holocaust survivors had filed a class action suit against four Swiss banks for the recovery of dormant accounts and looted property.

  Sometime later, I saw an article online by an Australian lawyer named Henry Burstyner, who was born in a Nazi labor camp in Poland. He wrote: “In the 1920’s and 1930’s the Swiss made chocolates, watches and Swiss cheese. Today they are a world financial centre. It is hard to believe that the money used by the Swiss for this transformation was earned by them from the sale of chocolates, watches and cheese!”[6]

  In the 1950s, the prevailing wisdom was that you should “keep your problems in your own kitchen.” Now, the public forum about the Swiss bank accounts served as an international invitation to change the pattern of silence and secrets. The scale of the international exposé made me feel exhilarated, as though somebody else cared about what happened to my mother—and all the other nameless mothers and fathers—after all. I recalled the words of one German newscaster on the night the Berlin Wall was breached. He described the chance encounter of two old friends, one from East Berlin and the other from the West, as “a coincidental meeting on the edge of history.” Now I was coming face to face with my own unexpected meeting with history.

  As soon as I found the contact information for the new commission, I called Switzerland and requested a claim form. When the envelope arrived from Switzerland, I tore it open and saw that a claim submission required a fee of 300 Swiss francs—about $250 at that time.

  “Those bastards!” said Lynne, when I told her. “It’s unconscionable.”

  I spread the nine-page application from the Swiss Banking Ombudsman on my kitchen table. Except for the birth and death dates I had collected from the Leipzig property documents, and my mother’s 1953 letter about an account in Lausanne or Geneva, I still had nothing to substantiate my claim. But I had my instincts and Lynne was on my team. She offered to write a testimonial letter to go with the application and Tom agreed to split the fee.

  I added a second letter, from a woman named Sidy Rayfeld who had been a friend of my mother’s in Leipzig. I had met Sidy several times when I visited my mother in New York, and she had taken my daughter shopping at Loehmann’s and to a Broadway musical.

  Sidy was a tiny, vibrant woman whose voice could fill a room. She immigrated to New York after escaping from the Nazis, married a man she had dated in Germany, and had twin daughters. She played the piano and accordion, and her husband, Ziggy, played the violin. They built a career performing together at Jewish weddings and bar mitzvahs, and in clubs in New York and hotels in the Catskill Mountains. After her husband passed away, in 1975, she moved to San Diego and continued to play piano with a performance group called the Forever in Their Primetime Players.

  I wouldn’t have known Sidy were it not for remarkable bit of synchronicity that brought my mother and Sidy together after almost thirty years.

  It happened in 1963, my junior year of college. I was going to study art in Italy, but was not part of an organized program. I was just an adventurous eighteen-year-old who had found very inexpensive passage on a student ship crossing the Atlantic to Genoa. As the ship started to move out into New York harbor, I stood on deck waving furiously to my mother on the dock below. I knew her eyes were as teary as mine, but my anxiety was eased by a friendly word from a girl my age who was waving just as furiously to her mother.

  Jackie and I became instant friends on our ten-day transatlantic crossing. We sat together in the dining room, talked as though we had known each other all our lives, and later hitchhiked together from Florence to Paris.

  When we arrived in Paris, we found letters from our mothers waiting for us at American Express. Both wrote about finding themselves face to face just as they turned away from the departing ship.

  “You are Alice Lewin from Leipzig!” screamed Sidy.

  “Sidy Bienenstock!” screamed my mother.

  Torn from their past by the Nazis, they had lost each other. But once they found each other again they remained close friends until my mother’s death.

  Sidy was very happy to hear from me. I had a conference coming up in San Diego, so I made a plan to have dinner with her. Michael and I went to her modest apartment. A piano took up one corner of the living room and a small dining table pressed up against the window with a distant view of the Pacific Ocean. Her German accent and even her speech intonations were so familiar to me.

  Sidy narrowly escaped the Nazis in 1938. The police came to her door one night and ordered her mother and brother to leave immediately for Poland, as they were not German citizens. She was exempt because she had already obtained a visa to go to the U.S. She watched her family leave that night with only the clothes they could carry. Later, coming back to Leipzig from Warsaw, where she had brought her family some belongings, she saw a brilliant glow of light on the horizon over the city.

  “It was November 9, 1938,” she said, “the terrible night of destruction when the Germans smashed and burned Jewish properties and synagogues-Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass.”

  Sidy had seen terrible things, but unlike my mother, she willingly talked about her experience. In fact, she had given an interview to the Shoah Foundation for its documentation of stories from survivors of the Holocaust.

  “A month later, just as I was about to leave Germany for Rotterdam, to board a ship to America, I was called into the government office for a search of my suitcases. An official pulled out a music book where I had hidden ship tickets I planned to mail to my mother and brother once I got to America. The official flipped through the book, but the pages where the tickets were secreted stuck together. I stood there with my hands clenched into fists.”

  She paused and looked away for a moment.

  “I had deep red fingernail marks on my palms for days after.”

  Her last letter from her mother arrived in 1941. She believed her mother and brother both died in the Warsaw ghetto.

  I was touched by the frankness of Sidy’s account and felt a familial closeness. As we sat drinking tea after dinner, I brought up the Swiss banking issue.

  “I heard Alice talk of the Swiss bank account,” Sidy said, “and I would be very happy to write a letter if you think it would help.”

  This is the letter she wrote:

  To Whom It May Concern:

  I, Sidy Rayfeld, nee Bienenstock, born in Leipzig, Germany, hereby declare:

  Alice Feniger, née LEWIN, and I were close friends. We both were born and raised in Leipzig. I knew her family, her father, who was a well-known dentist, her mother and her sister Erika.

  Our friendship survived necessary emigration, marriage, divorce, death, and when we both found each other again in the U.S.A., our friendship became even closer.

  Alice mentioned many times, that her father had deposited a large amount of money in a Swiss bank account, that this money would have been her and her sister Erika’s inheritance, but that all the papers pertaining to this account were lost because of the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis. She tried very hard to attain access to this money, got in touch with bankers and hired lawyers, invested a large amount of money, but all this without success. Had she and her sister been able to receive that money, life for Alice would have been much easier, since she was widowed at a young age and had a hard time raising her two children.

  Respectfully,

  Sidy Rayfeld

  Like Lynne, Sidy considered Alice a dear friend; she listened to her and believed her. It gave me solace to consider that I was not the only one my mother could talk to after all.

  On September 20, 1996, I clipped together the application, several documents from the restitution file to show lines of inheritance, the two testimonial letters, and a bank check for 300 Swiss francs. I placed the folded pages in an 8½-by-11 manila envelope. At the post office, I added airmail postage and a Return Receipt Requested label. Before the postal
clerk threw my envelope into the outgoing mail bin, I said a little prayer: “May this bring peace to all.”

  On the way home, I looked up at the sky and saw that the fog was beginning to roll in across the bay.

  20

  A String of Pearls

  For the next few months, I felt a shiver of anticipation every time I stepped out the front door to collect the mail. I imagined myself reaching into the box… My fingers fall on a long white envelope with a Swiss return address. I tear it open and read: Your grandfather’s bank account has been found.

  But as time passed, my frustration grew. Sometimes I went to the mailbox every hour or two. I chewed on my nails and got increasingly restless until I finally heard the clank of the postman opening and closing the metal lid. When I found just the usual bills, my heart sank like that of a desperate lover waiting by the phone for a call that doesn’t arrive.

  This was how my mother must have felt when she sent letters and hired lawyers to find her father’s account. Now that I knew more of her earlier losses, I could see that my father’s death would have struck her like a replay of the disasters she faced in the 1930s, when so many things in her life collapsed, one after another.

  I wanted to talk to Tom about the period surrounding my father’s death. In October 1996, he had a chance to come to San Francisco for a conference. After his meetings were over, I took him and Harriet to Golden Gate Park for the afternoon. Tom and I sat on a stone bench in the Rose Garden while Harriet walked on ahead to investigate the array of multicolored blossoms.

  “How did you find out that Daddy was dead?” I asked.

  “I haven’t thought about that for a long time,” he said after a pause. “It was a couple of days after he went into the hospital. I came downstairs from my bedroom and was hit by a bank of smoke. Mom and Erika were sitting at the kitchen table in front of an ashtray full of half-smoked cigarette butts. Mom turned to me and said, ‘You don’t have to go to school today. Daddy died.’ That was all.”