Shattered Crystals - Mia Amalia Kanner (that summer book TXT) 📗
- Author: Mia Amalia Kanner
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No sensible person threw out anything in those days. Everything had value to someone. Our last act in Limoges was to bundle the paper and string we had saved from sixty packages. We sold the lot to a paper dealer and netted enough money to pay our train passage to Le Havre where we would board our ship to America.
We spent five days in Paris, stopping at Gita’s apartment every day, missing her each time. We tried to get information about our relatives. The names Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Theresiendstadt had become familiar to us. Horrendous stories of privation, torture and murder at Nazi camps were being confirmed daily. At Red Cross headquarters in Paris, they had no information about Papa, or about Sal’s sisters and nieces. The number of inmates at the Nazi camps was so massive it took time to search them all and match requests for information.
To take our minds off what we feared, we became tourists. We went to the Louvre and marveled at the beauty of the paintings and sculptures, undamaged during the years of the war. Paris escaped being bombed or shelled during and after the Nazi occupation. The city’s buildings, boulevards and monuments were untouched by the war.
We spent an afternoon at the Eiffel Tower. It was a happy outing, far different from the time Sal took Ruth and Eva there in 1939 when he was a penniless refugee. This time, he had money not only to pay for the elevator ride to the top of the monument, but also to buy ices for Lea at a small restaurant midway up the structure.
The next morning, we boarded the train at Paris’s Gare St. Lazarre. The conductors had already closed the doors when we saw Gita running along the platform. She reached our car, and I leaned out the window, touching my friend’s hand as the train jolted forward. Tears streamed down Gita’s face and mine as the train began to outdistance her.
“That girl was never on time for anything,” Madame Herbst said. “I pray that Anni will take after her father.”
At Le Havre, I saw extensive war damage to buildings for the first time. The city was almost totally demolished. The Nazis had destroyed the harbor and sunk all the ships before they retreated and surrendered the city to the Allied Forces. I learned they did the same at the Channel ports of Dieppe, Boulougne, and Calais. More than a year after the war ended, we saw evidence of the havoc inflicted on the strategic port city everywhere we looked. At the waterfront, bows of ships not completely sunk filled the harbor, too many for me to count.
No structure was intact, and the emigration “office” consisted of a folding table and a few chairs set up on the pier where the Desiree was docked. Several officials sat in the open air, examining travel documents and clearing travelers for departure.
Three quarters of the passengers were war brides. A group of Hungarian Jewish men who had survived two years in a concentration camp, a few American businessmen, and a small contingent of American servicemen made up the balance. We traveled dormitory-style with men and women assigned to separate quarters. Sal shared a room with four priests who had served as army chaplains in Germany, and one American Jew who was returning from a business trip to Belgium.
“America is a good country,” one of the priests told Sal. “If you work hard and are honest in all your dealings, you will succeed there.”
“Yes, you must be honest. Be sure to declare everything you are bringing to America,” advised the businessman.
On the second day out, the Desiree encountered a summer hurricane. By the third day, I was so seasick I was unable to rise from my cot. “Find someone to help you,” I said to Lea, when it was time for lunch.
The captain found the child at the entrance of the empty dining room, took her hand, and led her to the captain’s table. She had her meals there for the rest of the voyage.
The sea remained rough until the twelfth day of the voyage. On the fourteenth day, we sighted land. By the time the Desiree pulled into New York harbor, it was evening and too late for the ship to dock. The passengers filled the decks and lined the railings to stare at the land. The sight of the thousands of lights in the tall buildings overwhelmed me as much as they did Lea and the young French and German war brides. The ship’s sleeping quarters, that had been constantly occupied during the rough Atlantic crossing, were empty that night, the passengers too excited to think about sleep. We had reached America.
I tried to summon English words and phrases I had learned in school in Leipzig when I was about the age of my two older daughters. I fingered the photograph of the girls, but still in my mind they were young schoolgirls, like nine-year-old Lea was now.
In the morning, I lined up with Sal to pay the import duty on the set of Limoges china that Madame Herbst was bringing to her daughter in New Jersey. I saw a guard placing handcuffs on a man. Sal said it was his bunkmate who had advised him to declare everything. “What nerve he had to make himself out as an honest man. That man is a smuggler,” Sal said as he handed his customs declaration to the official who spoke to us in Yiddish! “Zei Gesunt! Be well,” he said. Our morning was full of surprises.
The gangplank was lowered. Making his way down the wooden walkway, Sal held Lea tightly by the hand to keep the child from running ahead. We searched the crowded pier for the placard with the letter K. People were shouting and pushing; many were crying. I was sweating in my gray coat and bent to loosen the velvet bonnet on Lea’s head.
Then I saw my sister, Hannah, just as I remembered her—short, stout, and still blond. I became aware again that my own hair had turned pure white during the ordeal at Nexon. Hannah was flanked by a tall striking brunette and a redhead in a chartreuse green dress.
The two trios reached each other. For a tiny moment, enveloped by an immense hubbub, we were silent, and nobody moved. Then as Hannah reached for my hand, I lifted up my head to kiss my daughter Ruth. “We are here, we are here,” Sal beamed. I tasted salty tears and did not know if they were mine or Eva’s, who was embracing me. Then everybody smiled at Lea who hopped happily up and down on the hard gray concrete floor, shouting “Amerique, America!”
“OSE children traveled to Los Angeles from all over the U.S.”
All these years later, we still laugh sometimes at my first impression of New York. Driving through the city from the pier to my sister’s home in Kew Gardens, Queens, I said, “Look, all the apartments have balconies. Everybody in New York must be very, very rich.”
Hannah roared with laughter. “No, no, Mia. Those are fire escapes.”
With my sister’s help, we found an apartment on Ocean Parkway in the Midwood section of Brooklyn. All five of us moved there in October 1946. Ruth and Eva had not been able to remain with our Leipzig friends and lived with American foster families for four years. They were good people, but we were eager to be a family again.
Sal and I communicated with the girls in a mixture of German and English, as Ruth and Eva relearned German and I struggled to learn English. We were too busy with the future to dwell on the years we had been separated.
The apartment was a long way from Hannah, an hour and a half on the subway, so we were really on our own. It didn’t matter because we lived in a truly Jewish neighborhood, with kosher butchers and grocers within walking distance and more than one shul, so Sal could choose where to daven. It seemed that everyone spoke some Yiddish, and I felt welcome in our new surroundings.
Our first few years in America were hard. We came with nothing, and we all worked. Ruth and Eva had part-time jobs after school. Herman, who was a skilled fur sorter, secured work for Sal bundling fur pelts. He wasn’t handy and not very good at it. After a few months, he went once more to his cousin Karfiol who owned Delbeau, a specialty store on Fifth Avenue, selling designer ladies’ wear and lingerie. Sal worked in the store until his retirement when he was seventy-two.
Before we even moved into our Brooklyn apartment, Meyer Weinrauch, our friend from Leipzig, got me my first job. It was to sew linings into fur coats. I started in August, and it was very hot; the temperature in the shop must have been ninety degrees and working with furs made it worse. I wore a cotton housedress to work. Going home on the subway, a woman said to me, “Your dress is full of blood.” When I got home to Hannah’s apartment where we were still staying, I found my skin was chafed from sitting in the heat with the weight of the heavy fur coat on my lap.
Most of my co-workers were Jewish, and sad to say, all these women made fun of me. They laughed at my bad English and called me a greenhorn. “Greenie doesn’t know how to stitch, and she’ll never learn,” they taunted. When I was sixteen years old, I joined some friends in Leipzig for sewing lessons. I came home and told my mother, “If I ever have to earn my living from sewing I will starve.” I remember only one kind worker in that shop, a patient and understanding black woman who showed me how to do the work.
I begged Meyer to find something else, and he recommended me to a Jewish acquaintance who ran a shop where women worked by hand and on machines to make sweaters. It was on Willoughby Street in the Williamsburgh section of Brooklyn. I sewed buttonholes in sweaters for twenty-eight dollars a week and earned extra money from sewing I took home. After the girls went to sleep at eleven o’clock, I sat up in our apartment for another three hours stitching buttonholes. I was paid by the dozen and could finish three sweaters in an hour.
When the shop shut down, I wanted to look for other work. Ruth who was graduating from high school, said, “Enough. Stay home. It is my turn to work and help.” She took a job as a keeper, studied at City College in the evening, and became an accountant. When Eva graduated from high school the following year, she also took a full-time job and attended college at night. Later, when Lea entered Brandeis University, I went back to work as a saleswoman in Woolworth’s. They almost didn’t hire me, because I failed their first test. I said there were one hundred inches in a yard; then I realized I was thinking of one hundred centimeters in a meter. Eventually, I became a cashier at Klein’s, a discount department store, where the chief cashier was a Jew who had been a district attorney in Germany until the Nazis ousted him in 1933.
Eva and Lea earned post-graduate degrees. Lea is a geneticist and professor of biology at City University in New York. Eva is a writer and editor. I told her my story and she has written it in this book. All three girls are married, and
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