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

“We will go, but there is still time.”

I was confident that I would manage perfectly well by myself overseeing the business while Sal was away in Palestine, and I did. But it was a nerve-wracking time because of the unexpected new restrictions against the Jews. The Nuremberg Laws were promulgated on September 15, 1935.

The prohibitions were precise. Marriage and all social association between Jews and non-Jews was forbidden. True, that did not affect us personally, but any law against Jews was serious and could be merely the forerunner of further restrictions. The Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of German citizenship. I felt degraded, without being sure what loss of citizenship would mean.

There was no doubt about the meaning of the fourth provision; it affected me personally and immediately. The Nuremberg Laws prohibited Jews from employing non-Jewish women under the age of forty five as servants. The Nazis did not want young, gentile women to be in the homes of Jews. When Sal’s cousin Padaver came to the house to tell me, I knew at once it meant Lisbeth would have to go.

I wondered what to do, what to say to her. I need not have worried about her feelings. That evening, she went directly to her room, without a word to me. Less than an hour later, she came out, pushing her bulging suitcase in front of her. Holding her head high, and looking past me, she said “I will not be working for you any more.”

That was all, nothing else. She did not address me by name, did not offer a single word of regret. I was too shocked by her aloof manner and arrogance of bearing to say anything.

Lisbeth picked up the suitcase and walked out. I felt angrier and angrier. I accepted that she could not stay with us, but how could she just go, so unfeelingly? I had trusted her and treated her well, and I know she learned from me. She had grown up in our house during the six years under our roof. How could she just turn her back on me?

I watched her thump down the staircase until she disappeared from view. Then something drew me to the front window. A Nazi storm trooper was marching back and forth in front of our house. I recognized Lisbeth’s boyfriend. She must have gotten in touch with him that afternoon, when she took Ruth and Eva to the park. Lisbeth emerged; he took the suitcase and they disappeared.

Ruth came out of the girls’ room. “Mama, where is Lisbeth?”

“She went out,” I said.

“But she didn’t say goodbye,” Ruth complained.

I thought about that after I put the girls to bed; Lisbeth had been their nursemaid since the day they were born, had cuddled them, fed them, played with them, and now, she had gone without even saying goodbye.

The next day, her father came to see me. “You were not in the store today. Please excuse me for coming up to your home.”

“Yes, please step in,” I said.

“No,” he said. “It is not proper, but I must speak with you, Frau Kanner. You treated my daughter well all these years. I know she could not have found a better place.”

He paused. His eyes were moist. I urged him again to come in, but he refused.

“I don’t know what will become of any of us. My wife and I are Seventh-Day Adventists. I think I will lose my job as janitor. You don’t hear so much about it, but to the Nazis, we Adventists are as hateful as the Jews.”

Wechsel was normally a man of few words. I had never heard him speak at such length. “Lisbeth will marry her SS man who is constantly rude to my wife. My sons are in the Nazi Party. They talk against our religion and they threaten to denounce us if we don’t give up our beliefs and join the Party.” With unexpected force, he said, “I won’t do it. It is against God.”

“My dear Herr Wechsel,” I said, “I hardly know—”

“Don’t say anything, please, Frau Kanner. I shall pray for all of us. I wish you a good day, Frau Kanner. Please give greetings to your husband.”

He turned and went, a pathetic figure in a threadbare jacket. Poor man, so filled with pain, I thought. He is without hope. When Lisbeth left, I was angry. When her father left, I wanted to weep.

A week later, Sal returned from Palestine. Though he was worn out from the journey, we talked late into the night. It did not surprise me that he traveled up and down Palestine. He wanted to get a feeling for what it was like, how people lived, so he talked to the settlers, and he listened and observed. Their energy and vitality inspired him. Men and women worked long hours. They constructed roads and buildings that were to be schools, hospitals and homes, ignoring the heat he found oppressive.

“I visited a kibbutz. Mia, in the middle of the desert, I saw vegetables and fruit grow. It was unbelievable.”

He went to visit his niece, Hanni, in Tel Aviv. She and the rest of the city dwellers lived in incredibly primitive conditions. He had not expected to find electricity on the kibbutzim. But electricity was scarce even in the city, and many Jews lived in crowded shacks without indoor plumbing.

“I was with Hanni when I heard about the Nuremberg laws. She was appalled. She told me to send for you and the girls and not to go back to Germany. When I said it was impossible, she thought I didn’t want you to travel alone, so she urged me to go back to Halle and get you. ‘Bring them now,’ she said.

“I told her I had no skills or profession and I could not manage the work on a construction crew. How would I support a family in Tel Aviv? I explained to her my only option was to go back to Germany and wait for a capitalist visa. She came to the ship with me, still begging me to change my mind.”

Before we went to sleep, Sal showed me three solid silver bracelets he had brought back as souvenirs from Palestine, two plain bangles for Ruth and Eva, and the third, inlaid with filigree, for me.

He waited until the next day to tell me about the train trip through Austria to Germany. The cars were filled with men in Nazi uniform. They spouted Nazi slogans, sang patriotic songs about the purity of Aryan blood, and laughed at anti-Semitic jokes. Sal did not say one word during the entire journey. He prayed that Hashem bring him safely to Halle in time for Rosh Hashanah and that by the following year the family would be able to celebrate the High Holidays in Jerusalem.

At the Austro-German border, the customs inspector looked at the green cover of Sal’s German passport with indifference. “Gute Reise, have a pleasant journey,” he said. He stamped Sal’s passport, appearing not to notice that he was returning from Palestine.

As the train continued through Germany, the Nazis continued their boisterous joking. Sal pretended to be asleep and prayed silently for deliverance from the peril for himself and his fellow Jews in Germany. When the train pulled into the Halle station, Sal stood up and reached for his suitcase. His coat was over his other arm.

“Ah, Halle,” one of the Nazis said. “Is it your home?”

Sal nodded, making his way down the aisle of the train.

“Beautiful city,” said the Nazi. “Heil Hitler.”

Sal’s eyes clouded over as he recalled the journey. “I thanked God that both my arms were full so that I could not return the salute.”

Markus joined us, and Sal talked again about the rigorous life in Palestine. “We could leave now, but we would have to leave all our money. If we went now, there would be no servants, no hot water, no toilets. All of us would have to live in one room. I cannot ask you to live like that.”

“Sal, we could adjust—” I began.

He shook his head. “It was very bad on the way home. Nazis were all around me. But they didn’t take me for a Jew. Here in Halle it is like this; I am a Jew, and Hitler screams that Jews are not human, but the Germans who know us treat us the same as before.

“No, I think it is better to wait and emigrate as a capitalist. What I learned on my trip to Palestine and on the train home convinced me of two things. We will go, but there is time. All this talk against the Jews and these new laws disturb me. It’s terrible