American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest (23 page)

Wolfgang had never met his uncle Bernhard before. Bernhard had once had a mercantile business in El Paso and also owned a 115,000-acre ranch across the border in Mexico, where the family had farmed and made wine. Now he was in the insurance business. He was quite old, close to eighty, and short, like all the Schusters and Staabs. He wore a sombrero, had a waxed mustache and a perpetual cigar in his mouth, and spoke perfect Spanish. Bernhard’s wife, also named Emilie, was half Mexican, half Jewish. “She was like a queen,” Wolfgang said, imperious and regal. Their only daughter, born in 1900—four years after Julia’s death—was named after her aunt: Julia.

Wolfgang’s mother lived in the basement of Bernhard’s home and gave manicures part-time in a beauty parlor. When Wolfgang visited on weekends, he and Anna dined with Bernhard and his wife. They served chili and beans, Wolfgang said, and at dinner, “there was not much conversation.” Anna stayed with her uncle Bernhard until she was able to secure a visa, then moved to Washington, DC, to be with a daughter who had moved there.

Wolfgang was drafted into the army soon after—he served as a translator in the Intelligence Corps, interrogating German prisoners. Wolfgang’s father, Ernst, a successful lawyer before the Nazis took power, escaped to London after he learned he was about to be arrested, borrowing money from cousins in Paris to make the trip; those cousins were later killed at Auschwitz. In London, he made his first pennies carrying furniture out of houses bombed by the Nazis. He met a woman in London who made him happy, and persuaded Anna to give him a divorce. She later regretted it. She and Ernst had lost all they had: their money; their home; their community; their marriage.

They were, of course, the lucky ones.

Emilie Schuster Rosenthal with her daughter, Hilda.

Courtesy of Margit Naarmann.

J
ulia’s sister Emilie was not one of the lucky ones. She was wealthy. She was strong of mind and constitution. She had been generous to the people of Neuhaus and Paderborn. But none of these things could save her in the end.

I visited Neuhaus and Paderborn on my trip to Lügde with my mother. A local historian named Margit Naarmann took us around.
She was tall and elegant, with big, round features and plush cheekbones. She wore a hairband in her dark hair, and silver button earrings. Margit was not Jewish. She had grown up in a small village in the countryside, knowing nothing as a child about what had befallen Germany’s Jews. But as a young woman, she had worked in Scotland as an au pair for a German Jewish family that had emigrated during the war, and she was horrified by their stories. She’d returned to Germany determined to educate others about what had happened. She taught at the University of Paderborn, and she wrote books about Paderborn’s Jews, including one that told the story of Emilie and her family.

Paderborn was a well-tended city—cobbled streets, old baroque buildings, new buildings that looked like old buildings, and striking modern buildings, too. The Pader River welled from under the city’s heart, thousands of underground springs spreading tendrils and branches throughout the city. The people of Paderborn were tall, I discovered. My mother and I, five foot three and five foot five, respectively, felt lilliputian by comparison—how the Schusters must have stood out! The Paderborners were quite pleasant, if reserved. It seemed an altogether moderate place.

But of course Jews fared no better there than elsewhere in Germany. It was no Nazi stronghold—the city voted for the Catholic party, Margit told me. Nor had Paderborn’s citizens initially supported the Nazis’ restrictions against Jews. Julia and Emilie’s sister Amalie, for instance, had married into a family that owned the largest department store on Paderborn’s main square. When the Nazis ordered a boycott of Jewish businesses, many Paderborners refused and continued to shop at the store, until party thugs blocked off the entrances and made it impossible to do so. Amalie died of natural causes soon after: in retrospect, hers was the kinder fate. Her grandson Karl Theo, who ran the store, was sentenced to a nearby prison in 1938 for the crime of “racial transgression”; he sold the department store at a fraction of
its value. After his release in 1940 he escaped to Palestine, where he worked as a chauffeur.

Emilie’s mills in nearby Neuhaus were similarly “Aryanized.” Her partner in running the company, Carl Schupmann, wasn’t Jewish, so in 1933 they changed the name of the company from “Rosenthal and Schupmann” to “Schupmann and Rosenthal.” In 1935, they changed it again, to “Schupmann and Co.” That wasn’t enough: they sold the company in 1937—the rye, wheat, and threshing mills; the office, millwright house, pond garden, and meadows along the river Alme—to three businessmen who had no troublesome Jewish associations. A year later, on Kristallnacht, Emilie’s son Arnold was arrested and briefly imprisoned, bused past a mob of screaming Hitler Youth and Paderborn’s burning synagogue. In September 1939, Emilie was forced to move to a
Judenhaus
—one of five buildings crammed with Paderborn’s remaining Jews. Her sons, Heinrich and Arnold, and Arnold’s wife, Hilde, were sent to the same house.

Emilie tried to leave. She was almost eighty years old. Cuba was still accepting Jewish refugees, but the visas cost money. So did the draconian “departure taxes” required by the Nazi government, and Emilie had no more money. In the United States, her daughter Anna—Wolfgang’s mother—worked frantically to make arrangements. “We are all very happy that mother has finally agreed, so to speak, to make plans to travel to Cuba,” wrote Emilie’s son Arnold in the fall of 1941 in a letter to Anna, reprinted in Naarmann’s book. Arnold and his wife, Hilde, hoped to emigrate with Emilie; another brother, Heinrich, refused to leave. “We are getting everything ready,” wrote Arnold, “and we very much hope that you will soon be able to hold mommy in your arms.”

Emilie feared traveling to a strange land. “If Cuba actually comes about then everything changes, then I’m as good as lost, how sad for me!” she wrote to a daughter, Hilda Steffensmeier, who lived a hundred miles away in Essen and was safe, still, from the Nazis because
she had married a Catholic (she would later go into hiding). “Our great worries don’t allow for much joyousness,” Emilie wrote. “Nevertheless we can hope for ourselves and our family that we reach the island where at least one can live like a human being!” Jews were beginning to starve in Paderborn; friends were being arrested and deported, some resorting to suicide as a last means of escape.

Seeking aid for her relatives trapped in Germany, Wolfgang’s mother, Anna, traveled to New York, where a cousin lived—Arthur Nussbaum, the son of Julia and Emilie’s sister Bernhardine, who had visited Bad Pyrmont in 1891 with her bothersome husband, Bernhard. Arthur was the famous international law expert, now a professor at Columbia University. He lived on Riverside Drive. “He was an old man,” Wolfgang remembered, “very hard of hearing, very, very brilliant, very intelligent eyes.” Anna asked him to help her pay for visas for Emilie, Arnold, and Hilde—she needed $1,600 (in 1941 dollars) per person. Nussbaum agreed to give money but said he could provide only enough for Emilie. In Paderborn, the family grew more desperate. “Please, please dear sister take care of us as fast as possible,” Arnold wrote. “Keep in mind and do everything for mother, especially whatever you can to allow us to travel with her.”

In December 1941, however, that door closed altogether. Nazi transports began to depart from Paderborn “to the East.” Emilie and her sons avoided deportation for a time, pleading poor health. In April 1942, they moved into the town’s Jewish orphanage—a charity to which Emilie had once been a donor. “I am gradually adjusting to my new surroundings,” she wrote to her daughter Hilda in a series of letters reprinted in Naarmann’s book.

It’s not only the bothersome lack of space; other moments contribute. But when we hear what impossibilities others have to put up with, we just have to be satisfied and compliant.

I really can’t complain about the “accommodations” here in the house. Everyone is very nice and pleasant; it is peaceful. Fifteen children have not been brought back from vacation, sad but true! My time is filled with activity. We often have visitors in the evening, but I prefer being alone most of the time because there is much to patch, to sew so I use the evenings for that purpose.

Those small solaces wouldn’t hold, of course. Emilie wrote to Hilda again in May 1942.

My dear Hildchen,

These days I have so little good news to report that letter-writing provides no pleasure, neither for the writer nor for the reader. A threatening imminence hangs in the air again. . . . As of June 3
^rd
, the orphanage has to be vacated. . . . The employees have all been dismissed.

What is to become of the rest of us occupants has not been disclosed. . . . In any event we are facing in the near future another change of residence that surely will not turn out well this time. Barracks or something similar! What we all have had to endure!!!

Naturally we aren’t very well provisioned; others of our acquaintance are in the same situation; so we really can’t complain.

Where are my hairclips that I had earlier in my bag? I look so awful without my clips. . . . I hate to think of having to share a room with several other people.

With love and greetings,
Mother

The move from the orphanage was postponed to mid-June, then July. On July 12, 1942, Emilie wrote her last letter from Paderborn.

My dear Hildchen,

The worry about the near future weighs so heavily on me that I have no peace at all. Now the newest orders have been issued that all elderly people who are not bedridden will have to go to Theresienstadt. . . . It is supposed to be a privileged transport; we will be allowed to take 50 kilograms of luggage, as well as bedding, in addition to hand parcels. Appeals, it is said, are useless. So, now we have to get ready.

On July 28, 1942, Emilie and her two sons, along with the rest of Paderborn’s remaining Jews, were taken from the Jewish orphanage to the city’s train station. Emilie was allowed to bring food and provisions for two days—anything else would be confiscated—along with her fifty kilograms of luggage. She was allowed to take two blankets, though they would be included in the total weight. Everything else she owned had already been taken: her cash, jewelry, gold, silver, watches (time no longer mattered), personal papers, pension cards, ration cards, lipstick (appearances were of no importance, either), everything except the identity card that exposed her as a Jew. They were given receipts for the things taken from them.

The train carried Emilie and her sons to the nearby city of Bielefeld, where she crammed with six hundred other local Jews into a large lecture hall near the Nazi parade grounds. They slept on benches and chairs in the building. Three days later, on July 31, the train left for Theresienstadt. Emilie’s daughter Hilda traveled from Essen to the Bielefeld station to say good-bye. Emilie’s sons, Arnold and Heinrich, were devastated, but Emilie climbed in with her “chin up,” Hilda told her daughter Helga, who recounted this exchange in a speech many
years later. “I have to set a good example for my sons,” Emilie told Hilda. They were loaded into the cars, packed body to body. Before the train left, Hilda watched German soldiers haul away the bags that Emilie and her fellow prisoners had packed for the journey. They dumped the contents on the siding, and the train pulled away.

Portrait of an old woman waiting for food, Theresienstadt Ghetto, by artist and prisoner Leo Haas.

PT 1693, Terezín Memorial, courtesy of Tomáš Fritta-Haas.

T
he Theresienstadt concentration camp was not an official death camp like Auschwitz and Birkenau. Though tens of thousands of people died within its walls, it was a “ghetto” and transit camp—a holding spot to gather and prepare prisoners for transport “to the East.” Located in what is now the Czech Republic, about sixty kilometers from Prague, it held Czech Jews and political prisoners first, then
Jews shipped from Germany, Hungary, and Denmark, among other countries.

I hadn’t known of that particular camp until I heard from Wolfgang that Emilie had been sent there; now I wanted to learn everything about it. So after Margit showed us the sites of Emilie’s final humiliations—the electroplating factory that sits on the land where her grand house once sat, the train station from which she left Paderborn for the last time, the Jewish cemetery that should have held her remains—my mother and I set off for Theresienstadt.

I wasn’t quite sure how Emilie’s story linked to her sister’s, except that they had both died sadly, whatever side of the Atlantic they were on and whatever steps they took to evade their fates. I had read the Holocaust books that left me with a days-long hangover of anger and sorrow:
Night
,
Maus
, Anne Frank’s diary. But to have found a sister of Julia’s who had her own role in this most haunting of Jewish stories made the consequences of Julia’s heritage—and my own—suddenly real to me. Had Julia not come to America, this might have been our family’s fate.

My mother and I took a train from Paderborn to Prague, past Lügde and Bad Pyrmont, through Bielefeld and the rolling Weser uplands, then across the flat Northern Lowland and up the craggy Elbe River valley. Emilie would have traveled the same route on her last journey. In Prague, we spent an afternoon jockeying the narrow streets with the tourist hordes—the Charles Bridge, the Gothic excess of Saint Vitus Cathedral, a fifty-koruna spin through the shabby entrance hall of Franz Kafka’s first home—and then signed up for a tour to Theresienstadt.

It was drizzling the next morning; the eternal steely mist of central Europe, the sky the same dirty gray as the stone and concrete buildings and streets. There were only four of us waiting for the bus: my mother and I, and a glamorous Canadian couple on their honeymoon. Our guide was named Oleg. The name fitted him. He seemed to inhabit a
certain eastern European archetype: pale and rangy in blue jeans and a black faux-leather jacket, his brown hair flecked with gray, his eyes sorrowful and cerulean. He herded us onto the minibus.

We set off with a screech, careening across a bridge, past the fairy-tale spires of the Staré Město and on toward the city’s outskirts. Oleg sat in the front seat and gripped a microphone in both hands. “There,” said Oleg, “is biggest statue of horseman in world. Sixteen meter tall.” He sighed. “On left-hand side, interesting church.” He did not look to the left as he made that observation. He held the microphone so close to his mouth that we could hear spit flecks bounce. I wondered if I should have done more research before booking the tour.

We sped onto the highway linking Prague to Theresienstadt. Oleg launched into a brief, barely intelligible history of the camp. Theresienstadt, he said—I paraphrase, heavily—had been built as a fort in the late eighteenth century to protect the road to Dresden. In World War I, it had held political prisoners—Gavrilo Princip, the Serb who shot Austria-Hungary’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand and ignited the war, had died there in a small, dark cell. After the Nazis invaded, they walled off the prison and surrounding town, expelled the residents, and turned the enclosed space into a Jewish ghetto. All told, 150,000 prisoners went to Theresienstadt; only 3,600 people survived until liberation. While most went on to die in Auschwitz or other death camps, more than 33,000 people perished in the ghetto itself—because, Oleg explained, “these conditions of the ghetto and political prison were absolutely non-acceptable for the human life.”

Oleg fell silent. He seemed existentially weary—or maybe hungover. The drizzle had turned to rain, and the driver cranked the heat and cracked his window to stay awake. We were lulled by the road and the unbroken gray, my mother nodding off in the seat in front of me, the Canadians leaning in against each other. Oleg dropped his microphone into his lap and fell asleep, too, waking as we turned onto a
smaller road and mumbling something about collective farms, and perhaps the Prague Spring. “And on the right-hand side,” he said, though we couldn’t see the right-hand side, because our windows had fogged over, “you can see the very typical small houses, after the armies in 1968, um”—long, woeful pause, twenty, thirty seconds—“about more freedom. But now we are in the Theresienstadt!”

I wiped clear a spot on my window. We were passing a railroad siding. This was where the trains left for Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, Oleg told us. We sped past an unremarkable blur of concrete and fog and continued on into the town of Terezín—the former ghetto of Theresienstadt. The streets ran on a martially precise grid: not a curve in sight; street, building, street, building, street; thick walls, big, blocky entrance arches, flat-faced, stark, symmetrical. There was a rectangular park in the middle, smeared with fallen leaves. A woman with a baby carriage walked hunched against the rain. “Now we are transcending the border between the Jewish ghetto and the small fortress,” Oleg explained as we sped past the town and pulled into the prison grounds. It was rather a poetic way to put it.

The bus parked next to a vast cemetery, row upon row of low rectangular grave markers presided over by an enormous Star of David at one end and a cross at the other. “Attention of the hat,” Oleg said, motioning us down the stairs of the bus. We walked to the entry of the fortress, where we were to join a larger group of tourists with another guide before rejoining Oleg to visit the Ghetto Museum in the town. As we waited for the tour to start, Oleg asked me why I was taking notes. I told him I was writing about a relative who had been deported to Theresienstadt. He looked unhappy. “It’s a very sad place, very gloomy here,” he said. He pulled his collar up against the rain. “Not so often I go here, but every time I feel it bad.”

The tour of the small fortress made me feel it bad, too. It was as horrifying as one would expect—the bone-chilling cold, the dark,
the dank, the claustrophobic cells, the torture and execution sites, the German slogan over the entrance to a courtyard:
ARBEIT MACHT FREI
, “Work sets you free.” But it seemed rather sterile and unreal amid the bustle of our group of Holocaust sightseers and English schoolkids. I couldn’t decide if the tour was educational or macabre, valuable or mercenary—nor where my own pursuit of Julia’s and Emilie’s stories lay on that spectrum. I wondered if I should feel the desolation of the place more strongly for knowing that my great-great-great-aunt had died there. And I wondered if revisiting these sad truths restored the humanity of the lost, or if it simply served to gratify the tellers and the listeners; if the act of retelling kept those who suffered imprisoned in their unhappy endings.

We watched snippets of a propaganda film the Nazis had made about Theresienstadt. This was their model camp, their
Musterlager
, to prove to the Red Cross and international delegations that they treated prisoners well. Prominent Jewish artists, musicians, professors, and functionaries were brought to Theresienstadt. The elderly were shipped here, too. The Nazis had claimed they were deporting Jews to camps in the “East” to perform hard labor, but it hardly seemed plausible that people as old as Emilie could work; thus the Nazis presented Theresienstadt as a “Jewish retirement ghetto,” a “holiday camp” where, as the Nazi commandant Heinrich Himmler explained, elderly Jews could “receive their pensions and benefits and . . . do as they will with their life . . .” Upon their deportation, those who still had homes had to sign “purchase contracts” exchanging their houses, their remaining money, their life insurance policies, and their belongings to the German state in exchange for room, board, and health care for life.

Theresienstadt appeared, in the film, to be a pleasant place to while away a genocide. It was, the Nazis said, an idyllic lakeside spa “settlement.” When foreign delegations insisted on visiting, the Nazis
shipped the sick and malnourished to the death camps and beautified the place for a time—planted gardens and flower beds; painted houses; built a playground; opened a café, a music pavilion, and a community center; and created a special Jewish currency (a hook-nosed Moses, holding the tablets of the law) so that prisoners could go “shopping” in stores stocked with items confiscated from arriving prisoners’ suitcases. To soften the numerical grimness of the place, they gave the streets names: “L1 Strasse” became “Lake Street,” though there was no lake.

We sat in grim silence—the schoolkids, the ashen-faced Canadian honeymooners, my mother, and I—as the film showed smiling Jews, children giggling, eating, women gardening, a soccer match, a chess game, a lecture, a concert. “The organization of the leisure time is left to everyone’s discretion,” said the narrator. “I’m all right in Theresienstadt,” added the voice of a young prisoner. “I don’t miss anything.”

After the film, Oleg guided us back onto the minibus, dropped us at the Ghetto Museum, and wandered outside to smoke. The museum was situated in what had been a boys’ home during the war, number L417. Theresienstadt had had its own Jewish administration, which worked to provide decent conditions for the children, placing them together in dedicated houses and trying to keep up their education and their spirits. Imprisoned artists and academics volunteered to teach the children, believing, still, that learning could salvage hope. The artists and the children sketched their sorrow. The musicians composed symphonies. An amateur chorus performed Verdi’s
Requiem
for the prisoners and their Nazi jailers. They had one piano and only a single score, so all the singers worked from memory. They sang their own requiem.

In the downstairs rooms of building L417, the walls were lined with children’s drawings that one of the art teachers had preserved before she was deported to Auschwitz. There were dragons and princesses carefully outlined and colored, alongside SS guards and watchtowers—
hope side by side with despair. Some were scrawled and simple, some more sophisticated. They were drawings by the doomed: a sign informed visitors that of the more than ten thousand children who passed through, only a few hundred survived.

Next came the crematorium, an iron contraption in a barnlike building where the bodies of Theresienstadt’s dead were reduced to ash. A bas-relief sculpture of an owl regarded us from above the door. “Maybe is symbol of immortal memory,” Oleg suggested. We explored the stark rooms, clutching our raincoats closer around us, chilled by the statistics: the average death rate by September 1942 was eighty prisoners a day. Bodies arrived at the crematorium with a tag attached to one leg—name, transport number, group number—and left as dust. The crematorium was capable of handling almost two hundred bodies a day. At first the Nazis stored the ashes of the individual dead in wooden urns, and then in paper cinerary bags; later, they began incinerating the bodies together. By the war’s end, they stored the commingled ashes wherever they could, Emilie’s among them. In 1944, with the Allies approaching, the Nazis emptied 22,000 urns of those ashes into the river Ohre and buried another 3,000 in a pit nearby—a bulldozer operator found the macabre trove in 1958.

We were running behind schedule; Oleg fairly pushed us onto the bus. We drove through the fallow fields surrounding the camp, a few husks still standing, and back to the pitched roofs and curved roads that you find in real villages where real people live, where things are cluttered and asymmetrical. The Prague skyline grew visible through the drear. Oleg, caressing his microphone, pointed out the horseman again, still “sixteen meter tall,” and a very tall television tower. I could see Wenceslas Square approaching, where Oleg would gratefully leave us. He began talking much faster, almost cheerful now, his words skipping away: “On the right-hand side the embassy of Brazil, on the left-hand side the embassy of Argentina, now we will finishing our trip
today, I would like to say you welcome again Prague, welcome the Czech Republic, try to be careful, and good lock.”