The Hand of Fate

What a portentous title. But it's true, you know.

I've been reading again - about the Holocaust. Such casual words - 10,000 were picked up here and taken to _________. 85 survived the war. 14,000 were caught up in the net and taken to__________ . They were shot and shoved into open trenches - that they had had to dig first.
Oh yes, their clothes and possession were taken from them first - sometimes their fillings were dug out before they were shot sometimes after. They might not be dead yet when pushed into the trench, but the trenches were filled in anyway.

How close we came to that. A mere 6 weeks before the war started we ended up in England.

My Grandmother, my Aunt Toni and Uncle Selig had gone back to Poland thinking it was better than Germany for them. That's where they had started, with my Mom. Germany looked like a bright and wonderful future for them back then but now - in 1938 or 1939 (I don't know when)
Poland seemed like a safe haven.

Letters went back and forth as the family tried to stay connected. My Mother was very close with her older sister. She, my Mother, was the youngest of six children and her Father had died when she was 14. After 1942, we never heard from them again. The Red Cross could not find any documentation of their end. Shooting groups of Jews in Poland and pushing them into open graves - or leaving their bodies strewn around the streets and ghettos of Poland leaves no record.

My Mother's three brothers escaped. Uncle Sidney, the oldest, and his wife Aunt Helen (and she is another story entirely) left Germany in 1938 (I'm not sure of these dates but close enough).
My uncle had been picked up by the SS and taken to a concentration camp but in those days the camps had not become the killing fields they were later. My Aunt, in her inimitable way, went to the camp commander and begged, pleaded, cried, demanded - whatever - and he gave them 24 hours to get out of the country.

My Aunt had done the same thing for her Father in Russia when the Red Army arrested him. She was just a teenager then, but it worked. She, her sister and her Father had to leave in a hurry and they took the Trans Siberian Railway, ended up in Japan. From there they went to France and then Germany. Poor thing - from the frying pan into the fire.

Aunt Helen and Uncle Sid ended up in Brazil for 3 years - living somehow by him peddling stuff in the back country and jungles. Literally carrying a pack on his back. Somehow they made it to the USA - I never knew how they did it but they were legal and, after the war, sponsored my Mother, Father and myself to come to the United States.

My Mother's other two brothers, married and one with a little boy ran to Italy. My one uncle - Heini - was married to a non-Jew (Wally) but the handwriting was on the wall, the non-Jewish spouse was a ticket to survival but not for long and their son a "mischling" (mixture or mongrel) would not be excluded from their fate.

Italy turned out not to be such a good place for them either and they kept going. South America became their home, eventually Santiago, Chile. There they made a good life for themselves.
Uncle Albert and Aunt Erna had five children - four boys and the youngest a girl. Throughout my young life my Mother would show me pictures of my cousins and name them for me - like a nursery rhyme so that I knew I had family and felt attached to them. Norbetito, Leotito, Juanito and Albertito. Clarita was born about the time we came to the United States - 1947.

Uncle Heini and Aunt Wally had Wolfgang, born in Germany - and later Jaime. They opened a pharmacy and, as far as I know, Wolfgang still runs it in Santiago.

My Father's family was less lucky. I only recently (2009) found out that his brother Jussel, sister-in-law
Rosie and little boy, Sigfried were taken to Auschwitz in 1942. Rosie and Sigfried were killed immediately and Uncle Jussel lasted until 1944. His suffering must have been awful. Sigfried was a little older than me - 6 or so when he died.

I'm going to be Bat Mitzvah this summer and I'm naming Sigfried to share in my Bat Mitzvah - the opportunity he never had.

My Father's other brother, Gunther and his non-Jewish wife - Gretel - managed to get to Spain and lived in Barcelona until after the war. They had one daughter, Annemarie - who was raised Christian. After the war they went to Caracas, Venezuela.

I've lost track of Annemarie and her family (3 sons) after our parents died. She would write me a letter in Spanish, which her Mother would translate into German. Then my Mother would translate the German for me into English.

When they came to visit us in Los Angeles - about 1968 or 69 - we spoke in our broken German.
She and I look like sisters. But she is gone from my life now - I tried to trace her but to no avail.

My Father's Mother - my Grandmother Bertha - died in 1938. She was diabetic and got a gangrenous thumb. She died in surgery - which my Mother always said was murder by the Nazis. After all my reading, I'm inclined to believe her. Even in 1938 that should not have been a serious operation with such a fatal outcome.

After the war - when we came to the United States - my Father found somehow his first cousin
Maria Tannenburg and her son Horst. They had survived the camps and now lived in Skokie, Illinois. They visited us a couple of times - never talked about the camps. Horst is clearly a damaged person. A few times I tried to find out about my Father's family from him but he always says "I was just a teenage boy. I didn't pay much attention to the family connections.
But your Mother was so beautiful. You know I was at her wedding and I had a crush on her."

I tried writing to Horst and got pretty much the same few words every time. He did mention my Aunt Rosie and Sigfried and until he told me I had not known their names. My Mother - the person who connected me to family - focused on HER family. Horst also told me that my grandmother Bertha was one of 12 children - all married and with children - some of whom were old enough to have another generation of children. He told me that all were gone - only one uncle who got to Israel survived and, by the time, I got that story from Horst, that uncle had died too.

I figure that there must have been at least 60 people in my Father's family who never made it out.

Horst and I exchange New Year's cards - or actually his wife, Margo and I exchange New Year's cards. Very little information on them. They have one daughter who I met years ago. She wants nothing to do with the whole subject of Judaism, the war or for that matter, family. She made that clear.

So my Father and Mother grew up in the arms of a large, probably contentious family. There was one Uncle in my Father's family who was the Patriach and he decided that my Father wasn't smart enough for an advanced education and arranged for him to be trained as a plumber.
I know my Father was resentful - he had a speech defect which made his Uncle think he wasn't smart. But that trade was our ticket out of Germany.

This Uncle of my Father's did not want my Father to marry a Polish Jew. The German Jews felt very superior to them. The Polish Jews were thought of as being backward and dirty. He (my Father's Uncle) always checked my Mother's housekeeping when he came to visit and my Mother was very proud that he never found anything to complain about.

My Grandfather on my Father's side - Sigfried - was a soldier in the German army in World War I - he died from his wounds after the war - when my Father was 14. His widow raised the three boys - with the help of the family - but essentially alone. My Mother always said that those boys ran wild. My Father, Kurt, talked about the post war years with great bitterness as Germany was in an economic slump and there was high inflation. Survival was a struggle and he resented England and France for what they imposed on Germany which
ultimately led to the rise of Hitler.

I did not really know my Father. He left when I was one - we were reunited when I was 4 and I know he looked at me with bewilderment and alienation. I was English. I spoke English only. His English was pretty bad. I understood German but was not allowed to speak it. He tried to teach me songs in German and to give me a sense of "being German" but it was ashes in his mouth, I could tell. He tended to be dour and depressed but also a tease at times. I think he was a fun person before the war. He teased my Aunt Helen - with her airs and graces - by emphasizing his "peasant" status. He died when I was 14. Again that number 14.

So the life I was born into and the life I had were so entirely different. I felt English. I loved England. I did not want to leave England. And one day many years later, I realized I did not have one cell, not one gene that was English. I felt heartbroken.