Shattered Crystals - Mia Amalia Kanner (that summer book TXT) 📗

the celebrations because we had survived, yet we did not belong in this city, not with our daughters living on the other side of the Atlantic. Should we bring them back to France? Should we make our future in Palestine? Or should Sal and I try to emigrate to the United States?

Not long after V.E. Day, I received a package from New York. It was from my sister, Hannah, who sent useful items that were unobtainable in France. The box contained a pound of A & P brand coffee, three cans of condensed milk, powdered eggs, a large bar of Hershey’s chocolate, a cake of Ivory soap, and a bottle of vitamins. The last had been contributed by my cousin, Leo, a physician who had fled from Vienna in 1938 and was now a general practitioner in Brooklyn. On the tissue paper around the glass bottle, he had written, “All three of you should take these pills! Best, Leo.”

He did not need to sign his name. I recognized his angular script as I did that of my sister even before I saw Hannah’s name and return address on the package. Seeing their handwriting was like touching them and was more important to me than the message and gifts they had sent.

These common foods were beautiful, marvelous gifts. I wondered if Hannah realized it. I opened the powdered egg and the canned milk and made real pancakes. What a party that was. I can still remember the delicious taste of that ordinary dish that we had not tasted for so long.

Hannah’s familiar script pulled me back to the past and reminded me of the person I had been, a woman with a family and responsibilities, presiding over my own home, respected by my community. I contrasted my present existence in Limoges with my life in Halle before Hitler. Suddenly, what had been acceptable while the Nazis controlled France was now annoying, even unpleasant. For four years, I had cooked, cleaned and waited on others. Now I began to find these tasks increasingly irritating and demeaning.

The difference between Monsieur Meyer’s farm and his home in Limoges added to my discomfort. There was considerably less space in the apartment than there had been in the country house. And space was not the major problem. Rather it was the young Madame Dreyfus who was becoming ever more haughty, going out of her way to emphasize my status as a servant. At the farm, it had been the custom for everyone to eat together at a large, oblong table in the kitchen. In Limoges, I was required to feed little Michelle separately, then to serve Madame Dreyfus and Monsieur Meyer in the dining room. Only after I cleared the dining room table could I reheat the food for Lea and me. It was also expected that Lea and I eat in the kitchen.

I told Sal I did not want to go on like this. “I did not survive the war to end up a servant in the home of a spoiled, selfish woman.”

Sal agreed. “It is time to end our masquerade. I must put my own situation in order as well.”

He went to the director of the Limoges station. I laughed when he told me about his encounter. “I have to tell you that Georges Keener is not my real name,” Sal had said. “My name is Kanner, Salomon David Kanner. I am a Jew, a German Jew.” The director’s confusion turned to amazement when Sal recounted his multiple arrests and escapes from camps and prisons in Germany and France.

“This is all hard to believe,” the railroad official said. “Why, you don’t even have a German accent.” Sal explained that learning French made it possible for him to pass as an Alsatian. The director chuckled and said, “Listen, Keener, I mean Kanner, none of this really matters. You are a good worker, and now I am doubly glad I hired you. Go down to the Prefecture, get a proper identification card, and I will arrange civil service status for you under your true name.”

When Sal said he would have to talk this over with his wife, the director threw up his hands. “I thought you were a bachelor. Next you’ll tell me you have children.”

“Three daughters.”

“Too much, too much,” said the official, and told Sal to take the night off and bring in his decision the next day.

That evening over a glass of hot tea at Gita’s we examined the advantages and problems that came with the offer from the railroad. “You see, Gita, if I join the civil service here, I will have security, but it would be making a commitment to remain in France.”

“And we don’t want to stay,” I said. Sal and I had not actually made any decision although lately we had spent all our time together talking about the future. It was when he uttered the words, “making a commitment” that I saw clearly our future was not in Limoges, or even in France at all.

“I don’t want to stay in Limoges either,” Gita said. “So many terrible things happened in this city that I want to leave and never come back.”

“We belong in the United States now,” I said. “Living in Palestine and working in the Jewish homeland was our dream for so long; I would still like to go, but it would be unfair to uproot Eva and Ruth again. I think that is the first consideration.”

Sal agreed. “America is a good country,” he said.

“You’ve decided, then?” Gita asked.

“Yes. We need visas, of course. I’m sure my brother-in-law will help us to emigrate.”

“My mother-in-law is also going to America,” Gita said. “Simon’s sister and brother-in-law in New Jersey are sponsoring her.” Gita poured fresh tea. “Now listen, Mia, we can help each other. This is my idea. You are unhappy living in that house with Madame Dreyfus, and you know I don’t get along with my mother-in-law. So if you moved in here and stayed with her, Anni and I could go to Paris now instead of waiting for her documents to be approved. If you came here, the old woman would not be alone. She would keep her room, and I would, of course, continue to pay the rent for the apartment.”

“That’s too much for you to do, Gita,” I said.

“No, no, you’d be doing me a favor. She could even travel to New York with you when you go.” Gita looked over her shoulder to make sure the door was closed. “We never got along, not even when Simon was alive. She thinks I’m flighty, but she respects you, Mia.” Gita rose and took my hands in hers. “I know this old place isn’t much, with the toilet outside, but please, will you do it?” She was pleading; I saw it would be a relief to her if we agreed.

So Sal gave up his work on the railroad, and we moved into Gita’s apartment. What she did for us was to make it possible for me and Sal to be together. We were starting to be a family again. And it looked more and more possible that we would again be a family of five. I had always prayed and clung to this hope, even during the worst days of the war.

Lea remembered that her big sisters had gone to America. She thought it was a paradise and grew wildly excited, dancing round the new apartment, chanting, “I’m going to America. I’m going to America.”

Immigration to the United States was governed by a quota system. A complex formula established by Congress limited the number of people from each country allowed entry. Because we still held German passports, we tried to immigrate on the German quota. That was an advantage because it was much larger than quotas set for Eastern European countries.

The quota was only the first hurdle. Before an American visa was issued, every immigrant had to have a sponsor, an American resident who filed an affidavit taking financial responsibility for the new arrivals. I wrote to Herman and asked him to file affidavits, sponsoring us. We also needed to secure exit visas and health certificates. Finally, we had to find passage on a ship. That was not going to be easy. Passenger berths were scarce.

We did not have much money, but Hannah unwittingly provided us with an excellent source of income: the coffee included in her packages to me. There was no coffee in the stores of Limoges in those first months after the war ended. A pound of coffee was worth a thousand francs, and a parcel came almost every week. It quickly became known that I was a source of this precious commodity. Women I barely knew stopped me in the street and asked: “When are you expecting another package?”

We did not want to depend on the proceeds of the sale of American coffee alone. As soon as he left the railroad, Sal looked for other work. In that first year after the war, there were more jobs than people to fill them. Often willingness to work was all a person needed to be hired. Sal found a job in a tannery, sliding skins back and forth across a press to clean them, work more strenuous than anything he had ever done, except the forced labor at Calais. He came home exhausted, the smell of hides clinging to his hands, his shoes, his clothing.

“Sal, I can’t stand the awful smell, and I can’t stand to see you so exhausted,” I said. “Please, you must find something else.”

So my husband, a man with little manual dexterity, became a mechanic in a garage that repaired and rebuilt engines. Sal had neither experience nor any aptitude for working with machinery, but he was prepared to try anything, and the chief mechanic was prepared to try any man who presented himself. The garage was another mistake. The mechanic did not mask his relief when Sal resigned after two weeks there.

Finally, he went to see Monsieur Meyer, who gave him a post in his bank as clerk in the stocks and bonds department. Sal had found his niche.

By the time the United States government opened a consular office in Bordeaux early in 1946, Sal and I had amassed savings of more than thirty-five hundred francs, the bulk of the money coming from the sale of coffee from America. By that time also, Herman had supplied the affidavits certifying he would take financial responsibility for the three of us.

Sal made the one hundred twenty-five mile train trip to Bordeaux to apply for visas that would let us emigrate to New York. The Consul reviewed the documents and said there should be no problem.

How different it was. After Hitler came to power in 1933, thousands of German Jews applied for American visas, far more than the number the quota allowed. In the spring of 1946, we were assigned numbers three, four and five of the annual German quota. Only two other people with German citizenship had received visas before us that year. Sal grasped the terrible significance of these low numbers. “So few of us survived. There’s almost no one left who can qualify for the German quota to emigrate to the United States.”

Over a period of fifteen months, Hannah had sent sixty food parcels to Limoges. By selling sixty pounds of coffee, we had amassed 60,000 francs. It was enough to pay for our passage on the American troopship Desiree. As Gita had predicted, Madame Herbst also received her American visa, so Sal secured passage on the ship for her as well.

During my last week in Limoges, I said goodbye to my few remaining friends in the city, Monsieur Meyer and Marie Pouillard and her father. Rabbi Deutsch had already returned to Strasbourg.