Edited for Death (7 page)

Heinrich was the baby and spoiled by everybody in the house. There was always someone around to read to him, play with him, take him down to the cathedral square for a frosted ginger cake.

When Heinrich was four, Germany got a new chancellor. Walter said that this chancellor was just an aberration.

“After all,” he said, “Germany is a country of culture. We have a long and rich history of science, art, music and literature. This Hitler is an uneducated boor with no culture but violence. The German people will come to their senses soon, mark my words, and this will not even make a footnote in the history books.”

Walter and his family would rue those words. Besides being educated, well-to-do and generous with their wealth, the Blumenbergs were Jewish.

Not that this set them apart from their neighbors. They weren’t observant. They spoke High German and didn’t know Yiddish. Walter didn’t own a prayer shawl and Sophie, Heinrich’s mother, only used her set of milk china during Passover. They didn’t celebrate the major Christian holidays, but made no fuss about it, planning family parties during Christmas, Lent and Easter.

By 1935, Heinrich’s family started feeling the weight of Hitler’s taxation on Jews. Those who could still afford it, and still had documentation, began to emigrate. They went to the United States and Palestine, hearing the Zionist promises of creating a new homeland. But the Blumenbergs stayed in Heidelberg.

“My family settled in this town in the sixteenth century,” Walter said. “I’m not uprooting our history, our ancestors, our ties to this glorious city because of some dolt who can’t even speak decent German. The German people will boot him out and when they do, we’ll still be here.”

The Blumenbergs were losing a vast amount of wealth, but life in the big house went on. Walter’s colleagues at the University were abashed when they asked him to leave campus, but sent him private students to tutor anyway. Sophie’s social lists were slimming down as her Christian friends declined invitations, more from fear of Nazi reprisals, they assured her.

For the children, things didn’t change until early November in 1938. Kristallnacht destroyed and then looted Jewish shops across Germany and Austria. This brought home to the Blumenbergs that this was beyond the “mere aberration” of 1933. Walter and Sophie called a family meeting, announcing ten-year-old Heinrich was going to a private school in the United States. He was going because he was the only one the Blumenbergs could get papers for, and now the only one they could afford to send.

Heinrich spent World War II isolated from news of his family and the events in Europe. His mother wrote him, asking friends to smuggle the letters out almost weekly at first then dwindling to a few a year. The last one he received from her was in November 1944. She and his father had been able to get to Berlin where they felt they’d be safe.

“I know the war is coming to a close. I know that Germany is losing,” she wrote. “We don’t get much accurate news, but you can feel a change in the atmosphere, particularly here in Berlin. When we left Heidelberg, your brothers chose to try and make it to Palestine and we had no choice but to let them. I fear that when this horrible war is over we will have lost most of our children, but you, dearest Heinrich, must keep yourself safe and well and healthy so that your Papa and I may hold you again.”

Heinrich was now Henry Blomberg, six months away from high school graduation, speaking English with a flat, mid-western twang picked up from the other students at the school in the Chicago suburbs and listening to American music. He missed his family, but the hole was healing and the memories of life of the big house were fading and fragmenting. He was still fluent in German, usually dreaming in the language, but his daily life, what he was more and more thinking of as his real life, was thorough-going American.

A month before graduation, the pictures and news from the German concentration camps started arriving in America. Like everybody else, he just couldn’t get his mind to understand and know what his eyes were seeing. This was his homeland. Germans were the educated, culturally rich people his father talked about. This vastness of death had been taking place in the beautiful green pastures near Munich and the wildness of the forests by Ravensbruck. The countryside of Germany, so lovely in places it made your heart ache, had been the scene of a horror that drove people mad.

The letters from Henry’s mother stopped with the one from Berlin. He couldn’t allow himself to think of possibilities. The news wasn’t coming because of the turmoil in Europe. Cities were destroyed, there was no train or bus service, highways and bridges were gone. Civilian government was non-existent in what had been the German Reich and basic services like telephones and mail delivery were shaky in France and the Low Countries.

It would be easier and faster for him to start inquiries in the States than to try and contact any authorities in Germany. He started his search with the rabbi at the local synagogue, not a building he’d been very familiar with. The local Jewish leaders were trying to work together to compile lists of relatives who were missing, or hadn’t been heard from. Henry put his parents’ names and their last known address on the list, added his two brothers with the information that they had tried to escape to Palestine, and waited to hear something.

During the first week of June 1945, Henry was swept up in his high school graduation, a series of dances and parties given by his Chicago friends. With American food, he’d grown and filled out with 165 pounds on his 5’ 10” frame. He had a frank, open face and a ready smile that stretched to his blue eyes, and his curly light brown hair would have been unremarkable anywhere in the States. Girls were around and plentiful, but he hadn’t settled on any one in particular, preferring to go out with groups of both boys and girls. He didn’t give himself time to think of the past, falling into bed in the early morning hours after spending nights dancing

The music was enough to give joy and euphoria to the teens—the war was over in Europe and they could begin to plan their lives.

A good student with a knack for languages, history and art, Henry had applied at universities, finally choosing the University of Chicago. It was familiar, if he lived with his foster parents his scholarship would cover all the other costs, and it was noted for its liberal arts curriculum.

On a muggy day in late June, Henry’s foster mother called upstairs, “Telephone, Henry. It’s that rabbi you talked to about your parents.”

Though it was early, Henry was instantly awake and took the stairs at a speed that could break a leg.

“Good morning, Rabbi Morganthal.”

“Good morning, Henry. How are you? Are you getting everything together for the University? You are still planning to start in the fall, aren’t you?”

What was this? Why call and wake everybody up for social chitchat? Henry tried to keep the frustration and impatience out of his voice. “Yes, I have all the paperwork finished and my classes start right after Labor Day. Was there something you wanted to talk to me about?”

Impatience built in Henry’s mind. “Oh God, oh God, oh God, why doesn’t this idiot just give me the news first, why the chat, does he think he’s doing me some kind of favor, hiding it in social conversation?” With his hand over the mouthpiece, Henry took two deep breaths and squinched his eyes tight, stopping the nascent tears.

“I was hoping you’d heard something,” he said, proud that his voice didn’t quaver. “I know it’s only been a few weeks since I registered them, but there is some news coming out of Europe.”

“That’s exactly what I wanted to talk to you about,” the rabbi said. “The reason I asked about university was to see if you were still planning to be in Chicago for a while.”

“I’m not moving anywhere.”

“Do you have a job this summer? Could you use some money for university?”

Sure, he could use money. He was 17. He’d figured on having to take the train to get to school but with a job, a car was a possibility. That would cut it right; drive onto campus, have transportation available.

“I don’t have a job yet, but I have time. What kind of job?”

“You were right, there is news beginning to come out of Europe, and most of it isn’t good. Have you heard about the death camps? As people are liberated, they’re taken to makeshift hospitals and transit camps, given food and nursing but all the supplies are being overwhelmed. Millions of people have been uprooted, taken away from their homes, taken away from their families, taken away from their countries. Many are so disoriented they don’t know what country they’re in or how to get home, if they even have a home.” Though he tried to hold it back, bitterness and desolation seeped into the rabbi’s voice.

“A European background. A German heritage. A knowledge of the geography and the countries. And the ability to speak the languages.”

The last part was true. Henry had started out life speaking High German, but his mother had also given him lessons in French and Italian. With the English learned in Chicago, Henry was fluent in four languages.

“Well, I do speak a few languages. How would that help?”

Rabbi Morganthal said that a group of rabbis and Christian ministers from the central mid-west was beginning to get early lists of names of survivors. The refugee lists were not complete, and none of the people spoke or wrote English. The group was going through parish lists and telephone books, looking for similar names in the hopes that some survivors had relatives in the States who would take them in. What he was offering Henry was a job writing and translating letters back and forth, trying to patch together families blown to pieces in the last few years.

Henry said yes, with mental visions of a red convertible for school.

For the next three months, Henry was steeped in such abject human misery that some nights he couldn’t sleep. A woman from the small transit camp of Biederberg in Belgium had a sister living in Terre Haute. The woman came to the States. Two weeks later, she hanged herself from a tree in the sister’s yard, too overwhelmed with grief at the loss of children and all the rest of her family.

A 12-year-old boy from a small town outside of Berlin had managed to survive by being taken in by a group of nuns. A cousin of his father’s was found in a Chicago suburb, but when the boy was delivered to the woman’s house she took one look, said, “That’s not my cousin’s child, he’s the wrong Hans,” and slammed the door, refusing any contact. The boy was sent to an orphanage in Los Angeles.

But there were the other stories as well. A 15-year-old girl was reunited with an aunt, the only two surviving members of a once-large family in Bavaria. Two cousins, each believing the other dead, were reunited through a Bloomington temple. All through those months, Henry looked for his own family. His American life slipped further and further in the background and his German life took on a focus. Speaking the language he learned as a child brought back memories he thought he’d forgotten.

His father taking his students on a tour of the art treasures in the big house. His mother pouring tea in the garden. His brothers and sister getting to go out with friends.

The Sterns, Henry’s foster parents, were a good American family. Michael and Madge Stern had three children of their own. The two older ones, a boy and a girl, were already grown, the boy in the Navy and the girl married and working in a defense plant, when Henry came to live with them. Vickie, the youngest Stern, was in high school.

They took Henry in as one of their own, but they weren’t his family. Now, because of Rabbi Morganthal and his work with refugees, it was obvious to Henry that he needed to find his own.

When classes at the university began in early September, Henry was enrolled, but he didn’t drive to the campus in a red convertible. He took the train because every cent he’d earned with Rabbi Moganthal’s group during the summer was stashed away, waiting to be used in his search. Six weeks into the semester, Henry knew he wasn’t going to make it. Life on the campus was just too removed for him and he found himself switching between dual realities. While studying for an art history exam on 14
^th
century Gothic painting, he was suddenly standing in the second floor hallway of his family’s home, listening to his father lecture on the small Leonardo da Vinci sketch hanging on an honored place on the wall.

On Halloween morning, Henry packed a small bag, left a note for the Sterns and took the train to the downtown recruiting station. Three weeks before his 18
^th
birthday, he was sworn into the U.S. Army.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Nuremberg, Germany 1946

With his fluency in languages, the Army agreed with Henry’s request for assignment to Jewish Resettlement Headquarters in Germany. In January 1946 the boy who left Heidelberg as Heinrich Blumenberg returned to Nuremberg as U.S. Army PFC. Henry Blomberg.

He put in long and grueling days, translating official German records listing people sent to slave labor camps and death camps; lists of “captured” art, jewelry and other goods; lists of bank accounts and businesses taken over by the Nazis. He was astounded at the detailed records the Germans kept, but nowhere did he find any trace of his family.