Crossing the Borders of Time (57 page)

Janine (L) and Trudi at the Dyckman House benches on the corner of Broadway and West 204th Street circa 1951

(L to R) Harry and Trudi, Norbert and Doris, Len and Janine out to dinner in New York, 1951

In that enclave nestled between the Henry Hudson Bridge to the Bronx about thirty blocks north and the George Washington Bridge to New Jersey about thirty blocks south, Sigmar and Alice and other German-speaking émigrés endeavored to restore the civilized traditions of the land that had been home. By unspoken prearrangement, they met at the benches near the Dyckman House on daily walks throughout the area. Men in formal overcoats tipped their gray fedoras to ladies wearing velvet hats with black net veils. Politely they took care to draw off gloves to shake each other’s hands. “
Guten Tag, wie gehts?
” The
badisch
dialect of the Black Forest had migrated—as so many languages before and so many yet to come—to city streets that gleamed with the patina of acceptance.

Colorful Spanish signs describe a new array of upper Broadway stores these days. Gone now are the Irish bar, the Italian market, and the Chinese laundry whose grim, efficient owners starched the plain white shirts of Jewish refugees and handed them receipts with indecipherable pencil reckonings. Gone, too, are the sounds of German that filled the neighborhood when my cousin Lynne and I learned to roller-skate to the penny candy store on 207th Street to agonize over ten cents’ worth of choices or to the corner soda fountain for ice cream cones, pretzel sticks, and Golden Books with American stories that no one knew to tell us.

My mother’s stories were far more complex and disturbing. Early on, she held me spellbound with tales of danger and romance in far-off places. Knowing she had crossed the waters from a distant land called France, I believed that I could see it on the Palisades across the Hudson River, where what impressed me as the Eiffel Tower was actually a radio transmitter in New Jersey. While it was German that I heard all day, my mother insisted on evoking France as the scenery of my imagination. My favorite treat was therefore lunch at Nash’s, a Dyckman Street bakery where a mural in the dining room recreated a Parisian café on the rue de la Paix. As we ate our hamburgers and potato chips, I felt drawn into that Paris scene of tiny tables where waiters wearing aprons and mustaches balanced trays of demitasse for sophisticated ladies in fancy hats, fishnet hose, and cinched-waist dresses. Long-legged poodles posed languidly beside them, flaunting ribbons on their pom-poms.

In the real world, long blue numbers tattooed the inner forearms of the European women who picked out cookies for us from the trays of Nash’s bakery counter. And the real-world parties I witnessed in the afternoons involved quiet German couples who took turns hosting one another for
Kaffee und Kuchen
in their small apartments, happy to find familiar faces capable of mirroring the people they had been. In this brand-new land of supposed assimilation, these refugees rediscovered separation and tried to recreate a stolen world. As they draped their best linen cloths over folding bridge tables set up in their living rooms, Alice and her friends recalled with mute regret their abandoned gilt-edged china, thin Czechoslovakian crystal, and monogrammed silver, all chosen for their weddings and meant to last a lifetime. Now they set Swiss chocolates on paper doilies, dressing up the dishware that they never expected to be anything but serviceable. Converting grams to ounces, they drew passable Old World
Linzer Torten
and buttery pound cakes topped with powdered sugar out of ovens whose unfamiliar Fahrenheit settings heated their anxieties. Still, they contented themselves by reviving their recipes, their language, and their manners as they shared tips on filing claims for German reparations and tried to reintroduce themselves with American identities, if only to each other.

Aging émigrés tentatively built new lives in a land devoid of memories, relying on their own newspaper,
Aufbau
(founded in 1934 for New York’s German Jewish population with an advisory board including such intellectual luminaries as Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein), to enable them to read in their own language about their generation. I still remember them: Gretl, Marcel, and Jacob, Max and Emma, Frau Burger and Frau Dreyfuss, Herr Meyer and Herr Kaufmann—the latter being my mother’s former Freiburg Hebrew teacher, who reappeared in Inwood, inexplicably retaining his power to make her squirm. Like newly hatched birds fallen from their nests, they seemed frail and small, yet valiant. Yes, even now, theirs are the faces I remember when I hear a German accent that provokes a sense of intimacy stretching back to childhood. In those accents of the Reich, I hear the echoes of survivors. There is nostalgia in the love that a certain kind of German voice, with history in its undertones, always calls to life in me.

Sigmar spent the decades after his arrival in New York in his own private war with Germany, all of it on paper. His scrupulous efforts to calculate and verify his losses for
Wiedergutmachung
, or reparation claims, against the German government dragged across the years. He also struggled to obtain equitable compensation for the business and the Freiburg home given up to private opportunists whose payments, however undervalued, had been lost to him in blocked accounts in German banks. For the remainder of his life, as if it were his paying job, Sigmar sat almost daily at his desk, drafting letters and appeals that recounted his losses and expenses over six hard years of hiding and escape. He put the total cost of flight alone, not including the assets he relinquished, at 82,781.50 Reichsmark, for which the postwar German government initially agreed to reimburse him only for the inconsequential train ride across the border from Freiburg to Mulhouse in 1938. Much as he needed money and pursued his claims on paper, making handwritten copies of everything he sent, never once did Sigmar venture back to Germany to press his campaign personally with the acumen and expertise that would have been required.

In his written appeals, Sigmar mostly directed his attention to the transactions involving the two German brothers, Albin and Alfons Glatt, who had snapped up the Günzburger brothers’ “non-Aryan” building supply business for a token of its true worth. Norbert’s negotiations proved unsuccessful when he first went to see them in 1946, and Sigmar’s nephew Edy, practicing law in Mulhouse, gained nothing from them either. Now Sigmar wrote to tell the Glatts that time had come to reevaluate the situation. Why, the Günzburgers’ warehouse at the railroad tracks in itself had cost 36,000 Mark a full twenty years before they had been obliged to sell it to the Glatts for
half
that price! The Glatts had obtained the company’s furnishings, cars, and trucks at ridiculously unfair prices, and there were aspects of the business—such as its long-established base of customers and its rights to purchase scarce materials based on seniority—for which, contrary to usual business practice, the Glatts paid nothing. In all good conscience, Sigmar argued in his letters, the Glatts ought to pay the balance of what the business had actually been worth: they should either compensate the Günzburgers for having preyed upon their weakness under Hitler, or else give the business back.

In reply to such entreaties in 1949, the Glatts wrote Sigmar, insisting they alone had saved the business, while also voicing interest in coming to a compromise:

Very Esteemed Herr Günzburger!

We were so happy with the visit of your son. In the past years we often wondered where fate had placed you and where you spent the war years. We are very pleased to know that you and your family are doing well. I imagine your son told you how we are doing, but I wish to add a few details.

In the first two years after we took over the business, we had to work very hard to manage to get the business off the ground. Once we achieved that we were very busy throughout the whole war. Because all the male personnel were drafted, we were forced to work many more hours than normal. For instance, we spent every Sunday working.

The difficulties of transportation were enormous. Our trucks and personal cars were requisitioned. We enlarged the warehouse at the railroad tracks. We enlarged the business on the Rosastrasse considerably and started to sell screws. We took very good care of that particular part of the business and it developed well.

On November 27, 1944, however, the whole Rosastrasse establishment was destroyed [in Allied bombing] and with it the warehouse, offices, and apartment and furnishings of Herr Albin Glatt. Lost on the same occasion were all our files and paperwork and accounting as well as everything that was in the safe.… We racked our brains, but had to rely especially on the honor of our customers. It was impossible to avoid a loss, particularly since many of our clients were hit the same way and many died in the attacks. The railroad warehouse was hit by bombs several times and each time we tried to repair it.…

We spent the next six to eight months digging through the ruins of the Rosastrasse in the hope of finding anything that could be slightly usable. It was unbelievable how there was nothing to be gotten, but here and there we would find a complete fitting or a pipe or something of that kind. In that way we collected every charred nail and every melted screw or fitting we hoped to be able to reuse. The iron sheeting business was completely dead as we did not receive anything from October 1944 to the beginning of 1946. At the railroad warehouse we had to be very careful as there was always a risk of robbery and indeed several times people broke in and stole materials.

Beginning in 1946, the deliveries of material began to return, and by the end of the year, the business achieved a very strong upsurge.

For the last two months, business has been weakened, however, and the way the clients pay is terrible. We have to watch closely and constantly monitor what is happening.… I assume you are aware that the profits are pretty well absorbed by taxes.…

Personally we are more or less okay. Unfortunately, we both have lost our wives. Albin’s wife died in the beginning of 1945, Alfons’s wife in the beginning of 1948.…

Your son has wanted us to respond to the demands presented through Monsieur Cahen. We suggested a personal discussion and asked Monsieur Cahen to come here, but his busy schedule has made that impossible.… We would of course prefer to come to an understanding with you personally as we believe we would achieve faster results that way.…

With friendly greetings, the Glatt Brothers

In October 1949, empowered to act on behalf of his father and uncle, Norbert, still stationed in Germany, went back to see the Glatts again and naïvely settled for 40,000 Deutsche Mark, then equal to $10,000. Still far below the value of the company, it represented total payment for the business in the heart of Freiburg and the warehouse on the railroad tracks, as well as inventory, vehicles, accounts, and an established base of customers. Sigmar and Heinrich soon despaired that by depending on Norbert, with his youth and inexperience, they had once more permitted the Glatts to get the better of them. Indeed, two years earlier, the French military government had enacted a sweeping restitution regulation in their zone of occupation, including Freiburg, stipulating that victims of Nazism were entitled to get their assets back. To make matters even worse, Norbert had gone so far as to sign a waiver of restitution rights that eliminated the chance of further public compensation from the state.

At the same time, Sigmar and Alice were both kept busy writing to family and acquaintances in Europe and contemplating pleas from former associates who begged the Jewish couple to vouch for them in connection with official denazification proceedings under way in postwar Germany. Nazi sympathies that once appeared expedient now tainted reputations, endangering social standing, employment, and professional advancement. Thus Sigmar’s former Freiburg accountant, for example, wrote for help, as did the wife of the German military man whose family had lived rent-free in the Günzburgers’ basement before Hitler came to power. Writing from Bonn in 1951, their former tenant, Frau Nagel, bolstered her appeal to Alice with snapshots of her daughters, describing them as cheated by the casualties of war of the likelihood of finding mates, and of her son, pictured in 1943 wearing a German Army uniform with tall black boots and a medal on his chest. As ever, Alice kept a handwritten copy of her reply to Frau and Herr Nagel:

It is actually very difficult for me to answer your letter. So many sad and awful memories were reawakened—memories of a time when we were frightened and demeaned, times that took so much from our lives and that we would happily forget. Here, in America, thank God we are well and after our long wanderings we have found in this country a new homeland and bread, and for that we are very grateful. But until we got here we knew hard and painful years, and it is a miracle that we all found each other once again. Already in France, our flight to cross the demarcation line from the Occupied to the Unoccupied Zone was made possible by a worthy German officer. That in itself was a gift from God. If we had not been able to escape at that time, we would probably be among the six million who were gassed. Many of our closest relatives died that way. Also poor Fräulein Ellenbogen with her brother and sister-in-law.