Among the Reeds Read online

  Eventually, after what seemed like hours, they must have realized Papa was indeed not in the house. The sterner of the two, the leader I suppose, informed Mama that we were now under house arrest, confined to our home, forbidden to leave. They would keep our family hostage until Papa’s return. Their commander had demanded Leopold Offner’s arrest, and they would make sure that Leopold Offner was delivered to him. There would be a soldier posted outside our door to ensure that we complied. If we disobeyed we would be dealt with harshly. Heil Hitler! The door slammed behind them.

  Hours later, when I summoned the courage to take a peek out the window, I saw that indeed a tall blond S.R. soldier wearing that shiny uniform stood guard at our front door, barring the exit. His gun glinted in the weak March sunlight.

  For all Mama’s gentle demeanor, she had incredible strength. Rather than fall apart, she dried her tears, put on a brave face, and immediately started organizing the family. First she dismissed the servants for the day. Our governess, who was not Jewish by the way, chose to remain with us children. The rest of the help fled the house as quickly as they could. We never saw any of them again. Mama next bade the governess take us kids to the nursery so she could make plans. I resisted. At eleven I felt like I didn’t belong with the little children. Mama, worn out, I think, by the events of the day, and likely relieved to have an assistant, relented. And so I remained by her side, helping her “get ready,” she said. I wasn’t sure what we were doing, really, but I preferred to be part of the action rather than banished to the nursery.

  Mama brought me into her dressing room, drew the curtains, and locked the door. She started collecting photographs and other small items that she cherished, placing them carefully into a small sack.

  I don’t know if I dreamt the rest or if it actually happened. Maybe I saw this, maybe I just surmised it when I looked back on this day years later. But as I recall she gathered a few dresses and ripped open the seams, carefully inserting her best pieces of jewelry into the folds and sewing the seams back up. I do remember her insisting that everything I saw was a secret. It’s for security, she told me. Do not tell anyone about this. I understood we were hiding valuables because we were in danger. I definitely remember that much.

  The next morning Mama told us we too were leaving. We would make our way through the back door. Quietly, carefully, and not all together.

  Don’t be afraid, children, she told us. You girls know your way to the train station. It isn’t safe for us to go together, so listen carefully to what we have to do.

  The Nazis had posted a guard to keep us under house arrest, but he was only guarding the front door. I guess they didn’t know we had a back door. Later on those Nazi bastards would have been more thorough, more compulsive, and there would have been no chance of us walking out the back way. But that is exactly what we did.

  First Mama instructed the governess to escort five-year-old Nathan out. She took him by the hand, slipped quietly out the back door, and disappeared. We sat and stared at the huge grandfather clock as its hands clicked through time. At fifteen-minute intervals the cuckoo bird crowed. We were silent. Thirty minutes after Nathan, I left the house by myself, carefully following Mama’s instructions to talk to no-one, keep my head down, and make my way directly to the train station. It was a long walk, but I knew the way, and I knew how important it was to get there safely.

  We couldn’t bring big suitcases because that would have attracted attention. So we each carried only a small satchel with a few clothes, photos, and personal items. Inge came next, only eight years old, but already having to make her way alone. Lastly, Mama left our house, slipping out the back door like a thief, jewels sewn into her clothes, abandoning the beautiful home she had tended for many years, the place where she had raised her children and that was to have been a refuge.

  I was terrified that a stormtrooper would notice me, or Inge, little girls walking alone, or recognize Mama as the wife of a wanted fugitive, but miraculously no-one stopped us. Somehow we evaded attention, and we all met up at the Chemnitz train station. Mama bought tickets, and one by one we boarded the train bound for Amsterdam.

  Germany was no longer safe. Once again the family was on the move. Eleven years after settling in Germany my mother was fleeing, this time with three young children. She left behind her friends, her siblings, her extended family, her community, almost all her belongings. She left her financial security, her husband’s prospering business, her lovely home. She took her children and a few jewels sewn into the seams of dresses, and – in what was to become a pattern – fled quickly and without looking back. Our days of security were over. We were lucky to escape. Overnight we became refugees, fleeing blindly into another country where we didn’t speak the language and had no home.

  Two months after Hitler came to power, a few days after Papa’s abrupt departure, and only hours after we had been raided, our entire family was en route out of Germany.

  Genek

  Lvov, 1920s and 1930s

  Gimpel Bottner, known to friends and family as Genek, was raised in the city of Lvov, situated in the province of Galicia in western Ukraine. Galicia has changed allegiances many times over the years; though part of Poland when Genek was a boy, the area was at times controlled by Ukraine, at times by Austria-Hungary, and at other times by Russia.

  During Genek’s childhood, ethnic tensions exploded in Lvov, as Poles and Ukrainians fought for control of the city after World War One. In fact, even the city’s name is contested and has changed over the years: Lvov to Poles, Lviv to Ukrainians, and Lemberg to Austrians and Germans.

  It was in this tumultuous Galicia that Genek was born on April 1, 1911. Genek, despite a fiery temper, had a lively sense of humor: he always joked that he was a Galiciana first and foremost. He would inevitably accompany this announcement with a little sideways gesture of his hand, and a huge twinkle in his eye. Being a Galiciana meant he could be a bit of a thief, a bit of a rebel, and certainly one who would bend the law a little if it meant staying in the game. He said this half ironically. He didn’t have the fondest memories of the place, but still, it was home. Being a Galiciana meant pulling a fast one when necessary.

  Before World War Two Lvov boasted the third largest Jewish community in Poland, with over a hundred thousand Jewish inhabitants. One in three residents of Lvov was Jewish. There were many different sects of Jews in the city: Hassidim with their long black coats and curly sideburns, modern Reform Jews, and a Zionist community that longed for the formation of a modern Jewish state in Palestine. There were Jewish hospitals, a Jewish orphanage, Jewish theaters, Jewish sports clubs, and several Jewish newspapers. Genek’s family was a fairly typical working-class one, consisting of tradesmen and small shop owners of the type who ran many of the businesses in Lvov.

  Genek was the eldest of four boys. He lived with his father Ignacy (Yehudah) and mother Berta (Beila )(nee Fendrech), in the thriving Jewish quarter. Ignacy ran the family business, a small restaurant located at 121 Grodecka Street.

  While certainly not Hassidic, his family was traditional, speaking Yiddish, sending the boys to cheder – Jewish school – and worshiping in one of the fifty working synagogues in the city. They observed Shabbos and the holidays, and had a large network of Jewish friends and extended family in the city and its environs. The family lived very modestly; money was always tight. When Genek was older he would help support them when he became a bookkeeper.

  Genek’s father, Yehudah, like Melly’s father Leopold, had been conscripted to fight in the First World War for the Austrian-Hungarian army. Like Leopold, the experience left him traumatized and violent. When they were growing up he beat his four boys – Gimpel, Joseph, Moshe, and Ephraim – with a home-made whip. Moshe, called Mundek, the youngest and most rebellious of the boys, was particularly singled out for punishment.

  So life at home was rough, and despite its large Jewish population Ukraine was not an easy place to grow up a Jew. Anti-Semitism was rampant, and Genek’s fam
ily lived in constant fear of pogroms. Every couple of years, especially in the spring around Easter time, throngs of thugs would take to the streets of Lvov, breaking into Jewish homes and stores, raping, killing, and rampaging. In 1917 and 1918 large-scale pogroms took the lives of over a hundred Jews in Lvov, injuring many more. As he grew older, Genek itched to fight back, but his mother begged him to avoid the violent streets.

  Of average height but strong physique, Genek was a muscular young man with fair hair, his father’s prominent nose and his mother’s enormous blue eyes. Throughout his life he would enjoy robust physical health and have an aversion to illness or signs of weakness. He kept himself out of the street fights by playing football (soccer) in the Jewish sports clubs. Playing football would eventually open the door for him to get out of Galicia.

  One of the few places where the divisions between ethnic groups faded a bit was in the world of sports. While Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, and Jews feared, loathed, and fought each other in the “regular” world, sports teams and the competition between them provided a place of relative detente. Still, while there were some “mixed” teams of different ethnicities, most were segregated into single ethnic groups.

  The Jewish community had a successful presence in the sporting world in Lvov, especially during the interwar decades. Lvov Jews proudly boasted that one of their native sons had founded the Jewish sports league called Hesmonia, preceding the chapters later founded in Krakow and Warsaw, Lvov’s “bigger sister” cities. The league’s name was a Biblical reference to a group that fought for the Hebrew people’s religious and political independence in ancient times. Lvov Hesmonia had teams playing twelve different sports. Genek played for the popular and successful Lvov football team.

  Football was definitely the super-star sport in Lvov. In 1923, when Genek was twelve, Hesmonia opened the largest sports stadium in the city, able to hold ten thousand spectators, and to seat two thousand in seats. The Jewish populace was elated with this opening, even empowered enough to host international football matches at the stadium. In1925 a landmark match between Polish and Ukrainian teams was played in this Jewish-owned stadium, helping to ease tensions between ethnic groups that had been feuding for years.

  The Jewish teams were still sometimes the objects of anti-Semitism, however. There were accusations of unfair penalties levied against them by the Polish authorities. And in 1932, only nine years after its debut, tragically, the cherished stadium was destroyed by fire.

  There were other important sporting leagues in the area; one was called Maccabi. The Maccabi movement began around the turn of the century in Central Europe, when Jewish athletes, eager to compete in the sporting world, experienced anti-Semitic exclusion. Many smaller clubs eventually merged to create the Maccabi World Movement, modeled after the Olympics, with international athletes competing in a different country each time the Games convened. The first international European Maccabi Games were held in Prague in 1929, moving the following year to Antwerp, Belgium.

  There were many teams and many leagues, and there was a lot of complicated politics going on in the Galiciana world of football in the 1920s and ’30s. Eventually some leagues merged and coalesced into the Polish Football Association.

  Genek played for one of these teams, although whether it was Lvov Hesmonia, a Maccabi team, or another team is lost to history. In fact, it is possible that he belonged to more than one Lvov team during his youthful soccer years. What is known is that as a member of one of these soccer teams, Genek went to Belgium in the mid-1930s for an international competition. Most likely, then, he was playing for a team called Pogon, for that team did in fact compete in France and Belgium in the spring of 1934. That would have made Genek twenty-three when he first went abroad.

  At any rate, somewhere between 1934 and 1936 Genek, a street-wise young man from a tough Polish town, had the opportunity to go to Belgium, a country so much more refined and cultured that he spoke for the rest of his life about the impact this eye-opening experience had on him.

  He was dumbfounded by Belgium. His entire life he had lived in an old fashioned Orthodox Jewish community in a tumultuous and violent part of eastern Poland. Suddenly he saw that the world was a big place. There existed tree-lined boulevards with outdoor cafes and restaurants, where people sipped hot chocolate thick as honey and nibbled on delectable cream puffs. There were enormous plazas where flower markets erupted in riots of color, where pretty girls rode bicycles while chatting with their friends in singsong French. The Belgians wore beautiful clothes, the girls artfully coiffed and impossibly sophisticated, so different from the babushkas and other peasant garb the girls wore at home. And nobody seemed to notice, or to care, about one’s nationality or religious affiliation. Mostly, people here seemed happy and prosperous in a way Genek cannot have dreamed possible, and there did not seem to be any threat of violence in the streets.

  Struck by the tolerance and peace of the first country he had ever traveled to outside his homeland, Genek, for the very first time, must have realized that life could be lived in a safer, more harmonious setting.

  One of his teammates, a friend and fellow Jew named Hiss, was even more smitten. Hiss did not want to return to Lvov; he wanted to stay on in Belgium, run off when the match was over, desert the team when the time came for their return. He talked to Genek of staying, of seeking out the Jewish community in Antwerp, perhaps, and making a new life for themselves. Of course, this would have been highly illegal. The young men had no papers, no visas, no right to stay on.

  And Genek, though sorely tempted, had his family back home to think of. It would have felt impossible to not return home. His parents, his brothers, his cousins, his friends, his entire life was back there. Also he had a girlfriend. It was difficult in Lvov, unpleasant at times, but if he didn’t return, not only would Yehudah and Beila grieve the loss of their firstborn, but they would lose the financial contributions he made to help them make ends meet. Genek was especially close to his mother Beila; the thought of leaving her back in Galicia would have been painful. And then there was the girl he hoped would marry him one day.

  So the young men returned to Lvov with their team. But the idea of emigrating stayed with them. The two soccer players spent many long evenings together once home, talking endlessly, contemplating whether they would ever actually take the huge step of leaving.

  Genek would have liked his family to come along. He spoke to his parents and brothers about the idea, but they demurred. Beila and Yehudah were simple hard-working folks who couldn’t even imagine moving to a new country. Their whole life was here in Poland, their friends, their families, their synagogue. Genek’s talk of moving to Belgium would have sounded like craziness. Besides, even if they wanted to, who could get papers to move? Jews were restricted from travel. His brothers, Joseph and Ephraim, ridiculed him. Only Mundek seemed intrigued. He was the toughest of the brothers, a street-smart scrabbler and frequently in trouble, and he didn’t rule out leaving Lvov at some point, if the opportunity ever arose.

  Genek’s young woman was equally dismissive of the idea. A religious girl from a close-knit family, she declined Genek’s proposal of leaving Lvov for a distant country. The idea of moving to a place with no family, where she didn’t speak the language, didn’t know the customs, must have been terrifying. She was fond of Genek, but if he wanted to marry her he would have to agree to staying in Lvov. That was home.

  Despite his loved ones’ dismissal, the idea of moving remained in Genek’s mind, worrying him like a sore tooth. His friend Hiss continued trying to persuade him to leave with him. Genek had an agonizing choice to make. He can’t have imagined a future for himself in Lvov, living in fear of the next pogrom. But if he left his family, he couldn’t be sure that they would be alright. He couldn’t know when would he see them again, or whether his girl would wait for him. On the other hand, he must have feared that if he didn’t go, he would be squandering an incredible opportunity.

  By now the year was 1936. Hi
tler had been Chancellor of Germany for three years, and trouble was brewing in Europe. Genek, a Jewish 25-year-old from Poland, knew there was no hope for him or Hiss to obtain the necessary documents for travel, never mind to legally work in Belgium. Yet slowly his resolve grew. Life was becoming more and more unstable; the Nazis in neighboring Germany were churning out increasingly horrific propaganda against the Jews. The Russians were on Poland’s eastern border, likely gearing up for yet another invasion into Galicia. If they were going to leave, it seemed the time was now.

  Genek studied the maps he had collected during his earlier journey. A thousand cold and dangerous miles across all of Poland and Germany stood between him and his goal of reaching Belgium. And Germany was really terrorizing, a hotbed of anti-Semitism, filled with increasingly virulent National Socialists. The Nazis hated Jews, hated communists; the stories of their brutality were terrible. The journey would be arduous and dangerous. But the time had come.

  After a heart-wrenching goodbye to his family, and with tearful promises to be reconnected soon, Genek departed Lvov in the spring of 1936. Carrying a couple of days’ provisions that Beila tucked into his rucksack, Genek, together with Hiss, started walking west. Although he did not know it at the time, Genek would never see Lvov, his girlfriend, his parents, or two of his brothers again.