Trusting Calvin (11 page)

He met Hanka's train the following Saturday, but before he'd had time to kiss her or say anything at all, she grasped one of his hands in both of hers and launched into what she had come to say. “I'm very fond of you, Max, but I can't ever marry you. I want a husband who can provide a good life—a family, a house, nice clothes. I was deprived of everything for a long time, and I realize now that I want what I want. You're blind and will never be able to provide me with any of those things. I'm sorry, but that's how I feel.”

The words she spoke would have unmoored anyone on the brink of love, but they devastated Max. They confirmed that a blind man who allowed himself to get swept up in romantic thoughts about the future was engaging in folly. He studied harder.

In August 1948, Max graduated with a degree in physical therapy. He quickly passed the board exams, earned his license to practice and took a position the next month as a physical therapist at Bogenhausen Hospital in Munich. It had turned out exactly as Dr. Wesseli had promised, and Max allowed himself some pride in his accomplishment.

He and Sig rented a two-bedroom apartment on Dankwart Strasse in Munich. During the two and a half years that Max had been in school, Sig had opened a grocery store that was now being managed by his fiancée, Marianne. Brother Jack, meanwhile, had opened a tailor shop in Amberg and was engaged to marry a young woman named Violett.

The three brothers made regular visits back and forth between Amberg and Munich, the conversation always shifting at some point to the desire that each harbored to leave Germany, where their memories of the camps too often rose to the surface. Trying to atone for the devastation of the Shoah, the United Nations that year had carved the nation of Israel from the British Mandate of Palestine, and tens of thousands of Jews set their sights on a new life there. The Edelmans contemplated the same, the idea of helping to build that new state even more appealing now than it had been before the war.

Max no longer felt trapped or dependent on others. He could support himself with work that he enjoyed. He could take care of himself, and he could make his way around Munich on his own. He could not, however, unclench.

Dr. Wesseli, who had become as much a friend as a mentor, was concerned. He asked Max to dinner one crisp December evening, and when the meal was over and his wife had excused herself, Dr. Wesseli revealed what had prompted the invitation.

“You have come a long way since you were liberated. It's excellent, the progress you've made. Now, how do you intend to live with the scars of your ordeal? Go on being bitter, being angry, hating everybody for the evils done? What good would that do you? Negative emotions will consume you, Max. Don't hate. It's the acid that corrodes the soul.”

It would take a dozen more years before the notion of “survivor guilt” began circulating among the medical community. It would take many more years beyond that before professionals would begin to discuss the similarities in Holocaust survivors that were so consistent—thick, periodically debilitating depression; nightmares; anger; disorientation and disassociation; attachment avoidance; strictly structured relationships—that survivor guilt received credence as a real disorder.

Not until decades later would symposia and papers describe the uniqueness of surviving a trauma of the magnitude of what had happened to the Jews—how the aftereffects appeared stronger and more encompassing the longer a person had been exposed; how most survivors feared that if they opened up, they would be met with reactions that minimized their experience, and so they shut down nearly all connection and feeling. Years into the future, experts would declare that when the fundamental balance of an entire people has been crossed out and overwritten with something so ugly and indelible, it has a profound and lasting impact that extends even to subsequent generations.

But on this December evening Max was just one of millions of Jews steeping silently in distress.

And Dr. Wesseli had encountered enough young men liberated from the camps to recognize the many anguished similarities among them. Some learned more quickly than others how to cope; some required a great deal of time to conquer it, or to prevent it from ruling their lives; some went to their graves, sometimes by their own hands, confused and angry.

Although Dr. Wesseli was heartened that Max's newly acquired self-sufficiency seemed to have made his depression less all-consuming than it had been before, he still worried that what remained was shot through with such bitterness—that it was so active and raw.

The doctor was right about the anger and about the need to extract himself from it, Max admitted that night. But if there was a passageway out, he didn't know how to find it.

“You could think about becoming an advocate for tolerance and respect for human life,” Dr. Wesseli offered.

“There is value in that approach,” Max acknowledged. He wasn't that strong, he told the doctor, but it was something he could try to live in small pieces.

“If you can be successful, it would be a lasting monument to your family,” the doctor said.

There were no organized advocacy groups in Germany as far as Max knew. Most Germans he met, even those who were ashamed about what had taken place, didn't want to talk about those years, hoping to bury the whole period in the silence of history. Eventually, Max told himself, this ugly residue he was hauling around would dissipate, drifting into the atmosphere like a foul odor brought to nothing by a good, solid wind, and he would feel more normal again. He had to believe that.

Max began dating one of the hospital nurses, a well-built young woman with a big heart and infectious laugh named Lissy. Nearly every Saturday night they went to shows, often with Sig and Marianne, and later fell laughing into the little bed in her apartment, exploring each other with abandon, relishing their mutual passion. They took weekend trips to nearby resort towns and talked about everything from plays to politics, often into the middle of the night.

Soon they thought of themselves as a couple, although the label troubled Max. She was solid, and she was attached to Max, but he couldn't envision building a life with her. Her father had been a Nazi official, but that wasn't the issue.

“Maybe we just need each other,” he said to Sig one evening. “Maybe we each need to feel a warm body, a body we care about. But I don't know if that is love. I only know that I like her very much.”

Still, the couple talked of emigrating to Israel. Lissy was willing to convert, and she told Max often that she would be honored to be Jewish, to be his wife and live by his side in the new land. In the summer of 1950, they visited the Israeli representative in Munich, Dr. Sommerfeld, to discuss their thoughts. He didn't refuse them, but he offered no encouragement.

“The living conditions in Israel at this time are very hard, Max,” Dr. Sommerfeld said. “You have already suffered a lot, and you should consider going to America or Canada. Save going to Israel for a later time, when things will be smoother and more settled.”

Max had less than positive feelings about the United States, which had denied Jews entry in the buildup to the war, and which during the war had actively ignored what was happening to Jews and others in Europe. Although he was grateful the Americans had liberated him, too much had happened long before that. That's how Max saw it, and that's how all the survivors he knew saw it. However, Max's research indicated that no other country would take a blind Jew—not Canada, not Australia—so America became his focus, and that of his brothers.

Lissy's father's Nazi connections, however, barred her from entry.

“You know I can't stay here in Germany; it hurts too much. I have to go,” Max told her as soon as he was certain what he intended to do.

She cried but did not beg. “You have to plan your life, and I cannot be an obstacle. That's what I am now, an obstacle.”

Their time together had come to an end.

Not long after making this decision, Max traveled to Amberg to visit Jack and Violett. As usual, he made plans to see his former landlady, Mrs. Eichenmueller, and after they had finished their Sunday-afternoon dinner, a knock came at the door.

Mrs. Eichenmueller introduced Max to a young German woman named Barbara, the daughter of friends. The three made small talk, and Max liked the unhesitating way she answered his questions and asked her own. She sounded strong, competent, and caring.

“Let's go for a walk,” Max suggested to her after they had talked for about an hour.

The two headed off to a cafe where he learned she was twenty-four, lived with her parents, was well-read, and worked as a secretary in an insurance office. He felt an immediate attraction.

They began to visit each other regularly, one or the other making the two-hour train ride between Munich and Amberg. They went to movies and concerts, dinners and cabarets. She was pleasant, generous with her affection, and not at all coy about checking into the hotel by the train station when she visited him.

Their fate as a dating couple, Max decided, lay in her hands.

“I don't have anything to make a decision about—either she takes me or she doesn't,” Max told Sig one Sunday night after spending yet another weekend with her. “If I'm going to fall first, I could get very hurt. So I'm taking one step at a time. I can't afford being in love totally because it might come to an abrupt end.”

Max willed himself to think little about the relationship when they were apart, but matters of the heart proceeded very fast during and after war. Barbara soon invited him to meet her parents, and Max realized she was becoming very serious.

He raised the idea of marriage not with a request for her hand or an invitation to a life together, but with a recitation of the future as he saw it. If she was going to continue with him, he wanted her to understand precisely what she would be getting into. First, they wouldn't stay in Germany; they would move to America. Second, the complications of his blindness must not be downplayed.

She didn't fear tackling a new continent, she said. Indeed, she found the prospect interesting, stimulating. The language barrier was unnerving, but many people had successfully inched their way into a new culture, and she saw no reason why they couldn't do the same. As for his blindness, she had considerable experience with disability, she reminded Max. Her father had been badly injured while serving during World War I, had a significant limp, was in pain much of the time, and couldn't hold a full-time job.

“I have lived all my life with a person who is disabled,” she said. “I'm not a stranger to living with this.”

“It's not all that simple—sighted people marrying blind spouses,” Max countered. “Normal people have all their faculties. You can walk and talk and hear and see, and marrying somebody with a disability, it does not happen too often; it's not an easy decision. I won't try to convince you. The decision is for you to make, not me.”

Those weren't the words of love a young woman longs to hear, but he wanted to be honest, and he wanted her to understand how hard life as the wife of a blind man would be. He would work to support her and whatever family they were able to establish, he told her. He would never be the sort of man who expected the wife to take on all of the domestic and child-rearing responsibilities. But, he added, “If you live with a sighted person you will have to do your share; if you live with a blind person, you'll have to do a share and a half. That's the way it is. At this moment, you may think we'll do just fine, but that's not reality. You must face it with open eyes. If you accept it, then maybe we'll make it, but otherwise, no.”