Four Girls From Berlin , livre ebook

Four Girls from Berlin

Der Alte Fritz and Lotte
Four Girls from Berlin
A True Story of a Friendship That Defied the Holocaust
Marianne Meyerhoff
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Copyright 2007 by Marianne Meyerhoff. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey Published simultaneously in Canada
Wiley Bicentennial Logo: Richard J. Pacifico
All photographs courtesy of Corky McCoy except those on pages 174 and 193, which are courtesy of the United States Holocaust Museum, Washington, D.C.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Meyerhoff, Marianne.
Four girls from Berlin : a true story of a friendship that defied the Holocaust / Marianne Meyerhoff.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-471-22405-1 (cloth : alk. paper)
I. Jews-California-Los Angeles-Biography. 2. Jews, German-California- Los Angeles-Biography. 3. Refugees, Jewish-California-Los Angeles-Biography. 4. Children of Holocaust survivors-California-Los Angeles-Biography. 5. Mothers and daughters-California-Los Angeles-Biography. 6. Los Angeles (Calif.)- Biography. I. Title.
F869.L89 J5545 2007
940.53 180922-dc22
[B]
2007006192
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
For Joel, who helped me find my voice
Time was running out when my grandfather took a sheet of paper and typed out the names of his family and friends. He did not want them to be forgotten. Later, perhaps when he no longer had the use of a typewriter, he added other names in pencil. The vast emptiness of the rest of the page speaks poignantly to me of children and children s children never born who would have populated my world. I dedicate this book to the memory of them all.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Prologue
1 Glimpses of a Shattered Past
2 The Past Disinterred
3 Benny and Daddy
4 Hands across the Holocaust
5 A Tale of Til
6 Erica in Berlin
7 Lotte s Love
8 Rena
9 London
10 Rena s Class and the Voyage of the St. Louis
11 A New Direction
12 Wiedersehen , Not Good-bye
13 The Family Namgalies
14 An Interview with Jochen
15 An Interview with Erica
16 Heidelberg
Epilogue
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Rena Namgalies was the first to plant the seed in my mind to set the story of my mother and her girlfriends to paper. Lady Elizabeth Longford said I must do it. She said the world needed its heroines, and she never let me forget.
Years later, I interviewed Holocaust survivor Paula Lindemann for the Shoah Foundation. She was familiar with a form of German script used in the early twentieth century and offered to translate and bring back to life a cache of old family documents of mine, most of which, until then, had remained a mystery. Some of them appear in this book.
Sarah Ogilvie and Scott Miller of the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., marveled that this cache of documents presented a rare window on Jewish family life in nineteeth- and twentieth-century Germany. They set me on a course that led me to Hana Lane, senior editor at John Wiley Sons, whose wise counsel, along with the copyediting prowess of her colleague, senior production editor Lisa Burstiner, have added immeasurably to the final draft of this book.
Maurice Herz, linguist extraordinaire, went through the manuscript with a fine-tooth comb, and Corky McCoy s fine eye and photographic skills have been most helpful.
Ari Zev of the USC Shoah Foundation for Visual History and Education went out of his way from the very beginning to help me at every turn.
I also owe a world of gratitude to Jack Cummings, Barry Dennen, Phylis Dubow, J. Fishman, Allan Goldstein, Mikael Kehler, Connie La Maida, and Eva Silver for their unswerving concern and encouragement, and to my stepdaughter, Jill Steinberger, for her keen insights.
For their emotional, technical, and practical support, I offer them all my heartfelt appreciation.
PROLOGUE
My world dawns upon the eyes of my mother. She picks me up and holds me in her arms, and she peers searchingly, dreamingly into my eyes. I will always remember her eyes through the eyes of a three-year-old. They radiate overwhelming love and need in a blend of perpetual surprise, as if I am a miracle.
Was suchst du wenn du mir so tief in die Augen schaust, Mutti? What is it you look for in my eyes so deeply, so urgently, Mommy?
My mother, Charlotte Wachsner Meyerhoff, set me down on the side of my cot, which was covered with a khaki army surplus blanket. To this day, I hate the feel of coarse wool against my skin. I still hear the scrape of the wooden chair as she pulled it close to me across the cold cement floor of the garage that was our home in Los Angeles. Her native language was German, and she was fluent in Latin and French but not in English. For some reason she resisted it, though she struggled hard to learn it.
I loved a Mexican song everyone was singing in 1944, so Mutti listened to it on the radio and learned the Spanish lyrics by heart just so she could sing them to me. She sat next to me with her magnificent lute, the antique one that her father, the professor, had given her for her tenth birthday, and sang to me in Spanish.
F r Ma-ri-an-na she said, pronouncing my name the European way, f r meine sch ne M dchen , for my beautiful little girl. It was my own private concert. Mutti did not understand the lyrics to Cielito Lindo or the irony of how fitting they were for us.
Canta y no llores. Porque cantando se alegran, cielito lindo, los corazones . Sing and do not cry. For by singing, hearts become gay.
Her voice gave me joy, and my joy was all she lived for, so she added Cielito Lindo to the permanent repertoire of her favorite songs she loved to sing, the great music of Beethoven and Mendelssohn and Brahms and Schubert and Richard Strauss, and the racy cabaret tunes of Kurt Weil and Bertolt Brecht from exciting, cosmopolitan Berlin, where she was born and had come of age.
All I need to do is close my eyes to call upon that long-ago moment, as I have over the years, and see it again in sharp detail, like a waking dream. My sad Mutti sings, and she, too, is transfigured with joy. Her eyes, now mirthful, dart everywhere like a diva granting encores to the worshipful audience that but for Hitler would have been hers. Her voice floats like a velvet caress that lingers in the mind. In her rapture, she would have me sail with her on a great voyage to a magic place called happiness. But when her song ends, so ends her rapture. The vestige of a smile lingers on her face but is only a veneer. It cannot mask from me her torment that lies just beneath. I am not yet four years old, but I know that I am the stronger. I reach out to touch her face, and her eyes infuse me with her trauma. With the certainty of the child I reassure her, Macht dir keine Sorgen, Mutti . Please don t worry, Mommy. You will not be disappointed. All that you look for in my eyes you are sure to find in me. I am mother to my mother. I am all she has in the world to console her.
CHAPTER 1
Glimpses of a Shattered Past
I was a collector of vignettes from my mother s life, out-of-sequence fragments revealed in a hush in unguarded moments. Sometimes in the night she cried out for her father in her sleep, Papi! Or was it I who cried out in my own dreams for mine?
Her lips trembled, Mops, Mops.
Who is Mops? In time, I wrested from her that Mops was the pet name she had given to her younger brother, my Uncle Ernst, who exulted, as did my whole family in Berlin, when the news reached them from America that I had been born. My mother was five years old when Mops came into the world. At the very mention of his name she could barely contain her remorse. Mutti was not willing, in her waking consciousness, to talk of him, although thoughts of Mops were never far from her mind. Sometimes, when I displayed a certain characteristic or made her laugh by doing mischief, she let slip, You come by your impishness honestly. Your Uncle Ernst used to do that. You remind me so much of him.
When she watched a comedian, she lost herself in laughter, but while she laughed, she was sad. So was I sad. Isn t that the way it always is, the natural condition? Isn t everybody sad, and how is a child to know the difference if she is born in