Shattered Crystals - Mia Amalia Kanner (that summer book TXT) 📗
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SHATTERED CRYSTALS
Mia Amalia Kanner
&
Eve Rosenzweig Kugler
In Shattered Crystals, Mia Amalia Kanner recounts the true story of her desperate struggle to save her family from annihilation in Nazi Germany and war-torn France. Yet this is much more than a Holocaust history. It is about a courageous Jewish woman who, on finding herself destitute, becomes a cook in a home for war-displaced Jewish children. She faces an agonizing choice. Is giving up her three young daughters necessary to save their lives?
Mia’s odyssey is also a love story of a remarkable woman who secures her husband’s release from Buchenwald concentration camp. Then, during the darkest days of the war, he is arrested in France. Now she must find a way to save him from deportation to the death camps.
Before Hitler, they had been an ordinary family. As Mia and her husband face ever increasing danger and persecution, readers find themselves asking, “What would I have done?”
Original hardback edition copyright (c) 1997 by C.I.S. Publishers, Lakewood, NJ
Revised electronic edition copyright (c) 2009 by Eve Rosenzweig Kugler
This document is licensed under the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States license, available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/.
Ebook prepared by Ken Walton: ken.walton@carandol.net
Contact the author at: e-book@shatteredcrystals.net
or visit the Shattered Crystals website at
http://shatteredcrystals.net/
This is a text-only version of Shattered Crystals and lacks the maps and photographs mentioned in the text. To download the free illustrated PDF, visit the author’s website.
Dedication This is dedicated to the memory of the fathers:Salomon David Kanner,
who loved and lived for his family;
His father Markus Kanner,
who learned and revered Torah
and succeeded in the world without effort;
And Mia’s father, Moses Azderbal,
who saw all his children out of Nazi Germany
but was himself murdered at Auschwitz in 1942.
It is also in memory of the children:
Edith Rifka Azderbal,
who never grew up;
The beautiful, spirited children of the OSE
who could not be saved;
And the more than one million other innocent Jewish
children who perished in the Holocaust.
PREFACEAmong Holocaust survivors, there are some who have no memory of their suffering. Survivors do not choose to remember or not remember. This is beyond their control. In our family, the parents, Mia and Sal, and the oldest daughter, Ruth, remember. Lea and I, the two younger children, recall nothing. It is as if we began our lives as ten-year-olds.
Survivors who remember recall the horrors they endured in excruciating detail. They remember unimaginable deprivations, endless hunger and constant cold. They recall carefully planned and sadistically executed cruelties. They cannot forget the looting and loss of their homes and the disappearance and deaths of dear ones. They shudder at memories of assaults on their yiddishkeit (Jewishness) the desecration of siddurim, sifrei Torah, and cemeteries.
Their memories haunt their dreams. But they do not talk readily about such experiences or even about being survivors. Thus, friends, neighbors and acquaintances, even the person who sits next to them in shul, are surprised if it accidentally comes out.
Many who recollect nothing do not think it remarkable that they have no memories. They ask: Who wants to remember such things? Often they offer the explanation that they were just children, although they may have been ten, eleven or twelve years old.
For years and years, my sister Lea did not want to know. But I always felt some part of my life was missing. I hated the Nazis because they had robbed me of my childhood, and then felt ashamed and guilty for being unhappy, because so many children I had known had lost their lives, when all I lost was memory. I could not stop myself from mourning for my lost childhood. All I knew was that I had been part of a small children’s transport sent to America. Coming to New York, I left behind not only my parents and my little sister but hundreds of other Jewish children who also deserved life.
Many years passed before I went to my mother and asked her to help me. “Tell me what happened to me, to you, to all of us!” I pleaded. My father said, “It’s over. Forget about it. Why do you want to rake it all up again?” But mother answered, “If she wants to know, I will tell her.”
So the three of us sat in mother’s kitchen in Brooklyn, New York; I switched on a tape recorder, and she began.
Mother talked first about growing up in a warm, vibrant Jewish home in Leipzig, Germany, to make clear what the Nazis had destroyed. My grandparents, who until then had been just faces in black and white photographs, came to life. Then she described the rise of Nazism, Kristallnacht and the six terrible years that followed.
Every week, for one, two or three hours, as long as she could bear at one time, mother talked. After the first week, Ruth came, listened, and sometimes added details, even though for her, too, it meant reliving old traumas. Soon Lea joined us also.
The history that our mother, Mia, shared with us, her daughters, formed the basis for this book. Later, when we began to write this account, she added many details and produced family letters and photographs that had somehow been hidden from the Nazis.
We thank God for the gift of our family’s survival, continuation and growth. We are grateful that in December, 1995, on his 97th birthday, on Shabbos Chanukah, Sal was able to say, “I am happy Mia and I are here to welcome the birth of our great-grandson, Jacob. Baruch Hashem and Mazel Tov.”
Displaying great strength and courage, our cherished father Salomon David Kanner survived the Holocaust together with his beloved wife, our dear mother Mia, to live a full life, well into his 98th year until his passing on November 14, 1996.
Special thanks must go to many friends and family who insisted that this story must be written and published and would not let me give up when I was discouraged. In particular, my husband, Simon Kugler, my children Vicki and Mark Rosenzweig and my attorney and friend for forty years, Fred I. Sonnenfeld.
Eve Rosenzweig Kugler
London, England
December, 1996
AUTHOR’S NOTE
For this electronic version, I have made some changes to the originally published text. Also, in addition to this author’s note, to document and enhance the historical experience, a number of photographs and a map of France have been added. The map shows the various locations relevant to Sal and Mia’s years in that country, including the camps where they were incarcerated.
A great deal of new research about the Holocaust has taken place since Mia’s story was first published a dozen years ago. Moreover, we now have access to documents not publicly available then, including the Arolson files. This new material gives us answers to questions about the fate of some though not all of the members of Mia’s and Sal’s families. The information that sets out what happened to them is detailed in an afterword that has been added for this electronic version.
I have previously written extensively about my life as a foster child in America during the Second World War for the Shattered Crystals website. These recollections have been included in this electronic version of Shattered Crystals and follow the Afterword.
Finally, the glossary has been edited and expanded. I thank Ken Walton, and Christine of http://finding-free-ebooks.blogspot.com,for their help in preparing this text.
The publication of Shattered Crystals gave my mother, Mia, enormous satisfaction. In common with other Holocaust survivors, she believed every effort must be made to prevent another onslaught against the Jewish people with the purpose of their total extermination. She believed that documenting her and her family’s experiences so that people would know all that happened was one step in that direction.
Mia Amalia Kanner died peacefully at her home in New York City during the night of January 10, 2001 at the age of 96, with her daughter, Lea, beside her.
ERK, May 2009
Life as a German Jew
“It was an old axiom never to question goyishe officials.”
A few days after my birth in 1904 in the Galician village of Budzanow, my father walked to the town hall to record the event. My parents wanted everything in order before they emigrated to the German city of Leipzig with me, their first child. They had decided to leave our small village before I was born. There were not enough good opportunities then, nor in the future, for my father to provide for his family.
My father was known to the government official in charge of record keeping and the issuance of documents.
“So, Moishe, what is it this time?” the official asked.
“Very good news,” my father said. “I wish to report and record the birth of my first child. It is a girl, and she is to be called Minka.” Minka was the Polish version of my Hebrew name, Miriam.
“Minka?” asked the official. “Minka is no good.”
My father had not anticipated any objection to the name he and my mother had chosen. But it was an old axiom of the Jews of Budzanow, and I suppose in all the other villages in Galicia, never to question goiyshe officials without understanding the problem. My father remained silent and waited.
The official said, “You are going to emigrate to Germany, right?” There were no secrets in our village. Naturally, the Jews knew everything about each other. But the goyim, too, always seemed to know about the business of the Jews.
“So there is no sense in burdening the child with a Polish name. Amalia. That’s a proper Germanic name and will give her a good start in Germany. Yes, Amalia. The child will be better off,” he said. Then he presented my father with the document certifying that Jetti, wife of Moses Azderbal, had given birth to a daughter, Amalia Azderbal, on October 30, 1904.
Before my first birthday, following the example of many of my mother’s relatives, we left Budzanow for Leipzig, Germany. By then, Minka evolved into Mia, the name that my parents, uncles, aunts and cousins and my friends called me, ignoring the “Amalia” edict of the village functionary.
The story of my name became part of our family lore. When I grew older, I took it as an enduring example and lesson of how Jews behaved in the face of officialdom. It is best if Jews do not argue or question civil authority, especially when the issue is unimportant.
“We sang songs and talked about living in Eretz Yisrael.”
My father became a peddler and jobber in Leipzig. He traveled around the countryside to farmers who did not have access to the goods they needed. His wares, included kitchen knives, pots and pans, towels, clothespins, and socks of all sizes. If my father did not have a required item in stock, he would take a small deposit and write down the order in a little notebook he carried in his vest pocket. At first he took orders for shoes in a particular size or cloth of a certain color; later he accepted orders for furniture - tables,
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