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

Sal began corresponding with his brother in Bolivia and his two sisters in Tel Aviv before we left France. The crates we shipped from Germany to Palestine in 1939 were stored outdoors during the war. Furniture and paintings were ruined, but my sister-in-law sent my dishes, linens and silver. Some say they are material things. I treasure my set of meat dishes, because they had been my mother’s. When I light my candles on Shabbos, I use the candlesticks I received as a wedding gift. They are my links to the past.

The Holocaust is also the past. The Red Cross found the answers to some of the questions we asked. The ledgers of Auschwitz’s dead contains the names of Sal’s sister, Malia; his sister Fanny and her daughter Roschen, first deported to Poland ten days before Kristallnacht; his sister Elke’s son, Mendel, to whose wife Marthe, I gave money so the smuggler could lead her and her children out of Germany after Kristallnacht; the name of my father. He was arrested in Holland, so he did manage to escape from Germany. How long he remained in Holland or how he lived there, we will never know. There is a record only of his arrest and that he was sent to Auschwitz from there. He was murdered in the gas chambers. We know the exact date for his yahrzeit.

Of Sal’s close family who had been unable to escape from Europe before the outbreak of the war, only one, Malia’s daughter, Sadie, was located alive. She had survived Bergen-Belsen. His cousin Padaver survived, but his wife did not. His cousin Geminder was killed in Poland, but Geminder’s wife and older daughter, Lore, were saved as Schindler Jews, and his younger daughter, Irene, was a hidden child. A Polish family hid her in a chicken coop in back of their house in Mielec.

The Red Cross found no record of my sister, Edith*, whom Sal led out of Gurs in the autumn of 1940. One day, he met an Auschwitz survivor, someone he had known in Paris in 1939. “I remember your wife’s sister. Edith was with us on the train that took us to the camp, but she never made it that far. She died on the train. A lot of people died.”

In 1959, after all three girls were married, Sal and I were able to make our first of half a dozen trips to Israel to be reunited with our remaining relatives and to see the Jewish State, much of it developed and built by the people whom Hitler persecuted. During the war, and later when we struggled to reestablish ourselves in New York, I did not dare to hope it would be possible to go to Jerusalem. To visit and pray at the kotel was beyond my imagination but it became my privilege to worship there, when Sal and I traveled to Israel with Eva and her husband in 1992. It was our last visit to the Jewish homeland. Sal was 93 and I was 88 years old.

We continued to live in the same apartment we rented in Brooklyn in 1946, until Sal’s death. Sal recently passed away, at home, in November 1996, just four weeks before his 98th birthday. Until he was ninety-six years old, he continued to walk the half mile to shul on Shabbos. We lived in a neighborhood surrounded by Yiddishkeit and were long-time members of Congregation Agudath Shalom. Our rabbi knew our story, but others in the congregation did not, so they were surprised when we were honored at a Holocaust memorial service and chosen to light one of six ceremonial candles.

More than half a century has passed since I came to New York. I am an old woman. I am ninety two years old. We rarely talk about what happened, but I do not forget. I remember the Nazis taking my father-in-law away, coming in the dark of Kristallnacht to arrest Sal, and forcing me to sweep up the shattered glass in the street the next morning. The nightmares about Nexon recur to this day. Yes, I remember everything. I remember the desperate years in France when the only important thing was to stay alive. I recall those who helped us, and those who did not. These are not things one forgets.

Fifty years after the first Jewish children found refuge from the Nazis in the OSE homes, a half dozen OSE “children,” including Art Kern who used to try to wheedle morsels out of me in the kitchen at La Chevrette, organized a reunion in Los Angeles, California. Helped by notices the Simon Wiesenthal Center placed in Jewish newspapers throughout the United States, they received an enthusiastic response. When Eva wrote Art to say she was coming, she surprised him with a postscript that Sal and I were living in Brooklyn. Until then he did not know we had survived. He urged us to be guests at his home during the reunion and announced to everyone that we were his adopted parents.

Seventy OSE children traveled to Los Angeles from all over the United States. Childhood friends were reunited for the first time in fifty years. They brought the mementos they had salvaged from their childhood, a few photographs, the autograph books they made and the numbered baggage tags they wore round their necks on the journey and when they landed in New York.

The children were in their sixties and brought husbands, wives and children to the reunion. At a dinner at B’nai David Judean Congregation in March, 1989, Sal and I joined the sixty-nine OSE children on a stage where each spoke briefly, listing the OSE homes they had been in and citing the families and careers they built. They are teachers, lawyers, doctors, accountants, businessmen, engineers. One girl became mayor of a small California city.

When it was my turn to address the people, I stood up and said: “I am here with family. I will not forget those days at the OSE homes of Eubonne, Chateau Montintin, La Chevrette, Le Couret, and Chateau de Morelles. I am so proud of what you have accomplished. I love you all. You are all my children.”

Afterword

Much research about the Holocaust has been undertaken in various European countries, the United States and Israel since Shattered Crystals was first published in 1997. Until recently the existence of some records about victims of the Holocaust was known but not available to the public. Other documentation was located by scholars, writers and surviving family members of those who perished.

The Nazis were totally lacking in compassion; respect for the life of the men, women and children they annihilated was altogether absent, but they nevertheless methodically recorded the names and dates of birth of their victims, along with the dates of deportation and locations of their murders.

Dutch law requires that country to document the fate of all Jews who spent time in the Netherlands during World War II. Therefore, the Dutch Red Cross was able to supply additional information about the final years of the life of Mia’s father, Moses Azdebal. The records show that he came from Leipzig to Holland and ollwas registered in Haarleaaam on August 13, 1940. On November 18, 1942 he was interned in the transit camp of Westerbork. While in the camp he sought permission to emigrate to Palestine. This is documented on his Jewish Council registration card, dated November 23, 1942 and an acknowledgment on December 9, 1942, from the Council’s department that handles such requests. Approval for his immigration came in February of 1943, but sadly he had already been deported to Auschwitz on January 23, 1943 and murdered immediately upon his arrival there.

Even more information has come to light about Mia’s youngest sister, Edith Azderbal. A request I made in the year 2000 to the International Red Cross Tracing Service resulted in my receipt of Edith’s Arolsen file in September 2006. Documents received from the International Tracing Service, Bad Arolsen show that she was arrested on August 26, 1942, evidently as part of the major arrest of Jews in France that summer. She was interned in Camp Casseneuil, [Department] Lot et Garonne. She was transported to Drancy, the transit camp outside Paris on September 3, 1942.

After six days there, she was deported to Auschwitz as part of the 1,000 strong convoy number 30 on September 9, 1942. A typed list contains the names, dates of birth, nationality and French residence of all members of the convoy in alphabetical order. Edith Azderbal is listed as residing in Villeneuve and stateless. Chillingly, the Arolson file also contains a letter addressed to Obersturmbahnfuhrer Eichman in Berlin with copies to the concentration camp in Auschwitz that the transport left Drancy heading east in the direction of Auschwitz at 8:55 on 9.9.1942 with 1,000 Jews.

On arrival at Auschwitz only 69 of the women in convoy 30 were allowed to live. All the others including Edith were immediately gassed. Of the 1,000 men, women and children in the convoy, only 22 survived. The information about Edith’s death in Auschwitz contradicts the unidentified man’s report to Sal that “she died on the train.” [Chapter 48]. There are no known witnesses to either version.

Information supplied by the French historian Alexandre Doulut indicates that when they left Camp Casseneuil for Drancy, none of the Jews in Edith’s convoy were permitted to take any of their belongings with them. They were forced to leave their suitcases and everything in them behind at the camp. Four months after Edith’s death, the Commissariat general aux questions juives, the agency in charge of Jewish questions, decided that the suitcases and their contents must be sold. Pro-Nazi officials had the same compulsion for keeping exacting records as their German overlords. Between January and March 1943 the suitcases were opened, and their contents itemized, sorted, valued and sold. The typed lists held in the archives of Lot-et-Garonne show that the sale of a dozen items belonging to Edith yielded 738 francs. “This didn’t happen anywhere else in France during the war,” M. Doulut said. “It’s shameful.”

Yad Vashem in Jerusalem maintains an archive of testimonies completed by survivors and relatives of Holocaust victims.

Sal’s niece, Sadie Israel Rosenbush, who survived as a slave laborer and settled in Israel after the war, completed testimony pages for her parents Hermann Israel and Amalia Kanner Israel, who was Sal’s sister. All three were deported from our home town of Halle on October 28, 1939. They lived in the Polish town of Dembice until July 21, 1942 when Hermann and Amalia were murdered. After the war, Sadie moved to Israel where she married an attorney. She died in 2009, survived by her only daughter, three grandchildren and one great granddaughter.

Sadie also completed a testimony page for our first cousin Roschen [Rosalie] Koppel, also deported from Halle to Poland on 28 October 1938. Roschen had an opportunity to return to Halle as her mother did, but chose not to go back to Germany. Sadie reports that she perished in Poland on August 31, 1942 at the age of 24.

Fanny Koppel, Roschen’s mother, who left Halle in December 1938 for Berlin to live with her late husband’s family survived in the German capital for three years. Fanny’s name is found on a list of Jews who were deported from Berlin to Minsk, then part of the Soviet Union, now Belarus, on November 14, 1941. She was on one of the first transports destined for Mali Trostinek, a little known death camp some six miles outside of Minsk to which thousands of Jews were deported, all shot or killed in mobile gas vans immediately on arrival.

In England, after completing her required time working as a maid, Fanny’s younger daughter, Hanni, moved to London and spent the rest of the war engaged in war work in that city. Longing to be