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

close to family, in 1947 she emigrated to New York and lived near Sal and Mia for the rest of her life. Since she never married she joined my parents for shabbos meals and all the Jewish holidays. As her mother, Fanny Koppel, had looked after Mia’s children in the days after Kristallnacht, so, with Sal, Mia took Fanny’s only surviving daughter under her wing. Hanni died suddenly but peacefully in her Brooklyn home in 1996, when she was in her mid-seventies.

None of Sal’s surviving siblings equaled the longevity of their grandmother who lived to the great age of 99 in 19th century Poland. But all had a long life. Elka, Sal’s oldest sister, died in Israel aged 89. His brother Moritz survived in Bolivia to the age of 94. Lene, the next youngest of Sal’s siblings, who emigrated to Israel before Kristallnacht with forged documents paid for by Sal, lived to the age of 97. Sal was the last of the six, when he died at almost 98.

A few years after the war Sal’s cousin, Heinrich Padaver, married his cousin’s wife, Helene Geminder in California, both having been widowed during the Holocaust. Irene Geminder Eber became Professor of East Asian Studies at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and is the author of a number of scholarly books onebre wHebrw China, as well as a Holocaust autobiography, The Choice.

Mia’s friend, Gita, also remarried after the end of the war. She and her new husband, Andre, settled in Montreal, Canada where Gita gave birth to a second daughter, Francoise. Sal and Mia made a number of trips to Montreal to see them and were honored guests at Anni’s wedding.

Mia and Sal met often with her surviving family in America, Hannah and Herman, anna anher sister and brother-in-law, and cousins who had been able to leave Europe before World War II. They gathered at weddings and other happy occasions, or at each other homes for good food and conversation.

The long separation from my mother, Mia, during crucial years of my growing up created a gulf between us. As an adult, I sat with my mother for many hours, recording her life history and later listening as she willingly elaborated on her experiences when questions came up during the writing of this book. These times together did much to close this gap.

Shattered Crystals is used in various U.S. high schools and in a Midwestern university to teach the lessons of the Holocaust and the evils of anti-Semitism. In the hope that lessons are learned, I speak regularly to high school and younger students in New York and Great Britain about Mia’s courageous life, as she wanted me to do.

Addendum

A Child Survivor in America

INTRODUCTION

I was 10 years old when I came to the United States in the fall of 1941, one of more than a hundred OSE children who sailed across the Atlantic from France that summer on a special U.S. State Department visa. The OSE [the initials stand for Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants or Organization for Helping Children] ran group homes for Jewish children, mostly German and Austrian, separated from their families by Nazism and the war. My sister Ruth and I entered the OSE home called Villa Helvetia on the outskirts of Paris in November 1939, some six months after it was opened. Just before Paris fell to the Nazis in June 1940, the OSE evacuated the children of Villa Helvetia and its other homes around Paris to Chateau Montintin, where we went, and to several other properties it had purchased in the countryside of Haute Vienne and near Vichy in central France.

The State Department visa on which we traveled was originally issued for Jewish children held in internment camps in France, but it proved difficult to get children released from the camps. To avoid the visas going to waste, slots on the visa were given to others caring for Jewish children, including the OSE.

All the children chosen to go to America were either orphans, or the whereabouts of their parents were then unknown, or their parents were trapped in Nazi controlled lands. Since my mother had become the cook at our OSE home and my father was a handyman there, my sisters and I were not eligible. The day before the second transport was to leave, two children from another OSE home fell ill and lost their health clearance. Ruth and I were the only children who could fill the precious, vacated slots. Our parents alone were on site, able to give instant approval and sign all necessary documents. Suddenly, instead of congratulating the fortunate children who were off to a safe but exciting new life in America, Ruth and I were being congratulated. Six weeks later we stood on American soil.

From the time the Portuguese ship Mouzinho docked in New York and I disembarked until I was reunited with my parents five years later, I lived in three different foster homes. My sister Ruth lived in four. We were together in only two of these homes. They were difficult and lonely years for me. Being thrust into the midst of strangers was only part of the problem. Unlike children who remembered and carried with them the love and security of their homes and families in Europe, I brought with me no such memories. I dealt with the trauma of Kristallnacht and the confused, insecure and at times dangerous existence of the ensuing years by obliterating what happened. Unfortunately, amnesia is not precise. In excising terrors I could not grasp, I also obliterated my German-Jewish home life and surroundings and the love and support of friends, both adults and children, who made survival possible.

Emotionally damaged and traumatized by the Holocaust, I came to America with a hidden disability. With the best will in the world, the members of my foster families had no way of grasping the reasons for my deep unhappiness. How could they comprehend my feelings of isolation, my realization that I was different from other children. How could I explain to them my awful, never-ending feelings of guilt at having been saved at the expense of others, those unknown children who, the day before departure, became too ill to travel? And what of the many OSE children who had to remain in France who were equally worthy? It was enough that I had been saved; I believed I had no right to feel deprived or to want anything. I hid my unhappiness from everyone and cried into my pillow at night.

In 1989 five boys who had come to America with me tracked down 70 OSE children who had escaped to the United States or who survived the Holocaust in Europe. The 1989 reunion of OSE children in Los Angeles was an overpowering emotional experience for every one of us. I felt enveloped in friendship and love, perfectly at ease with people I did not remember or had never met. It was sufficient that we had been together during a crucial and hazardous time. Our life together and our shared experiences in the OSE homes created an unbreakable bond that held firm despite the passage of half a century during which we had had no contact with each other. That our reactions to being together again would be so alike did not surprise me.

What I did not expect was to discover that we had very similar reactions to our placements during our first years in America. For almost 50 years I believed that my unhappiness in my foster homes was unique. I was stunned to find that the American foster home life of so many OSE children mirrored my own. Moreover, although the reasons for our unhappiness varied, many were convinced that they alone had had a difficult time in their foster homes. Like me, they repressed their feelings about those first years in the United States and rarely spoke about them, if at all, until the gathering.

What follows are my recollections of my adjustment to America, how I coped with my five years in the foster homes, and a report of how some other OSE children fared in the United States.

GETTING HERE

July - September 1941

The voyage from Chateau Montintin, in Haute Vienne, a department or county in central France, is recounted in Chapter 29 - The Long Journey, above; the account is based on my sister Ruth’s recollections and letters she and I wrote to our Mother who remained behind. Briefly, we traveled by train to Marseilles. There, somehow many of us had become infected with head lice. We had our scalps scrubbed with a kerosene substance and walked around with white turbans wound around our heads. Cared for by Quakers, we spent two weeks waiting to board our ship. We waited in vain. The Mediterranean Sea had been closed to Transatlantic shipping, but liners were sailing from Portugal. We traveled by train to the Spanish border, stopping at the internment camp of Gurs, where relatives of some of the children were waiting on the platform. They could not get out so they handed the bread saved from their previous days’ meals to their loved ones through the window.

At the border we changed trains. Some of the children slept on luggage racks. Eventually we reached Lisbon, where we were housed in a boarding school whose regular students were on vacation. It was our first taste of peace and plenty in three years. For years I blamed my stomach upset on indulging in a new fruit, pineapple, but probably I just became ill from overeating.

I remember nothing of the voyage and it became real for me only at the reunion in 1989, when one of the men said to me, “I don’t remember anything about you in France, but I know you were on the ship with me.”

We arrived in New York on Labor Day, 1941. Ruth remembers that the ship couldn’t dock and we couldn’t get off because it was a national holiday. She says we were moored in the Narrows, and I suppose I had my first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty, though my own first memory is standing on the wooden pier, a manila baggage tag around my neck. I still have the tag with the number 24 printed in thick black lettering. Most of the other children saved their tags too; many brought them to the reunion in 1989. These bits of cardboard were a connection with France and tangible proof that we had made the journey. They were also a reminder of a place that was now full of danger but where, nevertheless, we lived in a spirit of camaraderie with friends whom we left behind.

On the pier at the request of a press photographer from the New York World Telegram the children were lined up in rows, the smallest in the front, the tallest on a bench in the rear, as youngsters are arranged for school photographs. I was in the front row. Then the photographer wanted the smallest children, and I found myself pulled forward with the youngest girl in our group, who was seven. Two little girls with short, straight, light hair wearing numbered cardboard tags, we made an appealing photo in the next day’s newspaper. My foster parents got hold of the photo and to my deep but silent embarrassment would show it to their visitors.

Our first American home was a dark red brick building that looked like a 19th century New England factory but was the Hebrew Orphans Asylum on 137th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, located across the street from the elegant Gothic buildings that form the old campus of the City University’s City College of New York. All I remember of that place is a large, poorly lit room filled with rows of cots on which we spent our days. My sister Ruth and some of the other children have told me