Long Way Home(6)
Our family had sensed disaster five years earlier, when Adolf Hitler came to power, and my uncles had immediately begun looking for ways to flee Berlin. My father refused to run. “This storm will blow over,” he insisted after the Reichstag burned in 1933. “Just like the tides at sea, the water may rise but it always recedes again. People will come to their senses. The Nazi Party won’t remain in power very long.”
The tide didn’t recede. It continued to rise higher and higher until it became an overwhelming flood. Vati’s two brothers planned to flee to the United States but learned there were immigration quotas and only a limited number of Jews were allowed to enter each year. Uncle Hermann went to Ecuador and Uncle Aaron to Cuba while they waited to enter the United States. Mutti’s brother and his family moved to Paris, taking my beloved grandmother with them. My family was the only one left in Berlin.
On the gray November afternoon of my birthday, the tension in Berlin’s streets resembled a beehive that had been poked with a stick, as Ruthie and I hurried home from our Jewish school. Vati arrived home early from work. He tried to make us believe it was for me, but I saw the worry and fear in his eyes. I rescued his newspaper from the rubbish bin and read the headlines. A German diplomat named Ernst vom Rath had been assassinated in Paris by a seventeen-year-old Jewish man. It seemed like a distant spark, miles away from Berlin, but it ignited a conflagration, unleashing a firestorm of hatred known as Kristallnacht—the night of broken glass. A night of terror.
Vati gave me a book of poems by the American poet Emily Dickinson for my birthday. It was a lovely volume with gold lettering on the leather cover. The poems were in English, a language I was studying. Mutti’s birthday present to me was a pearl necklace that had belonged to her grandmother. I had put the pearls on and was delighting in their cool, silky feel against my skin when we heard shouts and screams in the street below our apartment. We ran to the window and watched in horror as young men from the Hitler Youth poured onto our street, smashing into the ground-floor shops and looting the contents. When the Jewish owners tried to stop them, the youths dragged them into the street and beat them mercilessly. The angry shouts and bloodcurdling screams were like something from a nightmare. Then Vati noticed smoke and flames billowing from the synagogue down the block, and he ran to fetch his coat.
“Daniel, no!” Mutti begged. “Please, don’t go out there! Please!”
“I have to help rescue the holy books,” he replied. “Turn off the lights, Elise, and don’t answer the door.”
The firemen arrived but used their hoses only to prevent the Gentile-owned buildings from burning, not to save our synagogue. My body trembled as terror overwhelmed me. Vati! My beloved Vati was out there! Mutti pulled me away from the window and made Ruthie and me hide in her bedroom. The stench of smoke filled the apartment as the night dragged on. The sound of shattering glass crashed continuously as if thousands of crystal chandeliers were plunging to the ground.
When Kristallnacht finally ended after two days, we learned that hundreds of Jewish buildings and businesses had been set on fire all across Berlin. Jewish homes and schools and hospitals had been ransacked and demolished with axes and clubs and sledgehammers. Hundreds of Jews had been beaten and slaughtered. When the last of the flames died away and the smoke cleared, I was no longer a child.
Vati never returned home. We waited in suspense for two months to find out what had happened to him. In January, we finally received a postcard from him and wept with relief to learn that he was still alive. He’d been arrested along with thousands of other Jewish men and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp. He was never given a reason why or told what his crime was. The Nazis didn’t need a reason. Take the girls and leave Berlin without delay, the postcard read. Go to my brother Aaron. I love you more than words can ever say. Mutti wept for three hours after reading it.
“We need to go to Cuba like Vati said,” I told her when she finally calmed down. “Do you know if he was able to get our visas and landing permits?”
Tears filled Mutti’s eyes again as she shook her head. “I don’t know anything about it. He didn’t want me to worry. I wouldn’t even know where to begin.” Mutti fell into such a pit of despair that I didn’t think she would ever climb out. She had depended on Vati for everything, and he’d indulged and spoiled her. She’d never had to make plans beyond tomorrow, and she was incapable of doing it now. If my mother, my sister, and I were going to find refuge in Cuba, I was going to have to save the three of us myself.
I started by going to Vati’s former law office, trudging alone through the snowy streets since Jews weren’t allowed to take public transportation. One of Vati’s law partners, Herr Kesler, had been a lifelong friend and had remained one even after it became forbidden to socialize with us. He looked shaken when I told him that Vati was in Buchenwald. “I am truly sorry to hear that,” he said when he could speak.
“He wants us to escape to Havana, Herr Kesler, but Mutti doesn’t know where our papers are.”
He looked up, his expression brightening. “They’re here. The Cuban landing permits are here, in our office safe. Your father completed the affidavits and other paperwork your family needs for your US visas, and you’re on the waiting list.”
My relief was so profound that I sank to the floor. Herr Kesler hurried around his desk and helped me to a chair, calling for his secretary to fetch me a cup of coffee.