Shattered Crystals by Mia Amalia Kanner (no david read aloud .txt) 📕
Around that time, Mama entered into a business partnership with Meyer Weinrauch. Meyer's line of business was shoes, and he was opening a new store. While Meyer obtained merchandise from various wholesalers, Mama was to be in charge of the store.
The store was one the Eisenbadstrasse, outside the main Jewish district. Mama ran the business as smoothly and efficiently as she did her home. None of my friends had mothers who worked, but I accepted that my mother was different. I always believed Mama was a genius and could do whatever she set her mind to.
My friends were Jewish children who lived in our building and girls from clubs to which I belonged. I joined youth groups and we met on Shabbos afternoons to sing Hebrew songs and discuss religion and debate Jewish concerns. On Sundays, we went on outings
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“You see, Mia,” Sal said to me, “I was not important enough. I was just an ordinary person, one of thousands of nobodies.”
For days, Sal had trudged along the ocean with a group of men who counted on crossing the sea to safety. He had covered one hundred and twenty miles on foot, bolstered by the knowledge that the end of the taxing journey would be a boat to England and to safety. The waterfront at Bayonne turned out to be just the beginning because Sal knew he had to get away from the Nazis, and that meant he had to get out of France.
He went back to the Jewish community leader to tell him what he had learned.
“Go to Spain,” the leader said, and gave him fifty francs.
Back on the coastal road, Sal bartered his valise for a musette. He put his winter coat over his arm and continued walking south. It took more than a week before he came to the foothills of the Pyrenees, the mountains that divided Spain and France. His goal was the border crossing in the mountain village of Hendaye. He reached it on a hot, sunny day at the end of June. A narrow, wooden bridge in Hendaye separated France from Spain. On the bridge, the traffic was all one way, out of France. Black automobiles inched along the narrow road, with an occasional mule-drawn wagon lumbering forward between the cars, while throngs of people trudged along on either side of the vehicles.
On the French side, in the village of Hendaye, a booth had been erected to shield the border guards from the wind and sun. From a distance, Sal noticed that the guards reached out of their booth to collect identification cards. They hardly looked at the documents and casually replaced them with exit permits. They impeded no one from walking across the border out of France.
Sal gave up the temporary identity card he had received when he arrived in France in January 1939 and walked slowly into Spain.
He knew he would not be safe in Spain until he was at least three miles from the border. The roads might have been patrolled. If he were picked up near the border, he could be returned to France. Briefly, Sal considered cutting through the fields, but he was afraid he would lose his way. He knew no one in Spain. It was different when he had come to France from Germany; Hannah and Herman were in Paris, and he knew he could find them.
Now he was in Spain, and it suddenly occurred to him that the girls and I were in France. He felt as if he were abandoning us. “What am I doing?” he cried. “I must be mad.” Resolutely, he tightened the strap on the musette, changed directions, and walked back to Hendaye.
At the frontier booth at the end of the bridge, Sal told the guard, “Give me back the French card.”
“Stand aside and wait,” the guard said. He completed exit permits for a large family then said to Sal, “You want to go back? Are you sure? You must be crazy.”
Sal returned the permit he had been issued earlier in the day, and held out his hand for the rumpled identification card. Then he walked back to France.
Crossing the border into France, he turned east, hoping to reach Nice. The Mediterranean city on the Italian border had been designated a free zone under the June, 1940 Armistice between France and Germany. From Nice, Sal intended to begin a search to find his family. Coming to the main road, he encountered a group of Polish and Austrian refugees. There was one German Jew among them. “I would not go to Spain,” the man said, “they are anti-Semites.”
Because it was hot, they walked slowly, moving aside when they heard an occasional vehicle coming up behind them. Soon they heard the louder engine of a truck and moved to the side of the road. The truck stopped. Three French policemen climbed out.
“Papers, papers,” said one of them.
One by one, the refugees handed over their identification cards, explaining they were Jews and were going to Nice.
“These papers that you hold are not valid in our province,” the policeman said. “Get on the truck.”
“But we are Jews,” they protested.
“You have no legal status,” the policeman said. “You cannot wander the countryside at will.”
Sal was the one who asked, “Where are you taking us?”
“To the camp at Gurs,” answered the uniformed man. “I am sorry.”
When Sal arrived at Gurs, he did what he always did. He walked about the camp seeking information. One of the first things he discovered was that Gurs was an open camp. However enticing this piece of information, Sal saw little point in walking out. He was without identification papers. It was inevitable that he would be picked up again.
The French had constructed Gurs in the mid-nineteen-thirties to accommodate Spaniards fleeing the dictatorship of General Franco. The camp was huge and Sal wandered on dusty dirt roads, past block upon block of barracks, past stores and laundries housed in wooden shacks, past water pumps and outhouses, searching for acquaintances among the inmates and learning camp procedures.
He learned that if an inmate had a place and people to go to, camp authorities would approve his release and issue travel documents. But he had no idea where the children and I were. Then he saw my sister, Edith. She was thin and irritable and had a vacant look in her eyes. Sal asked her what she was doing in Gurs, but the only answer he could get out of her was, “I came on the train with the others.”
Sal went to Edith’s barracks and explained to the barracks leader that Edith was his sister-in-law and that due to a birth defect she had a mental age of no more than 10 or 11. The young woman replied that they had wondered what the problem was, explaining that the only thing Edith had ever said was, “They made me leave Hannah.”
Each afternoon Sal brought Edith part of his bread ration. She constantly craved food because of her thyroid deficiency. Sal took her for walks around the camp, hoping to distract her from her ravenous appetite that could not be satisfied in Gurs.
One afternoon in September, Edith said, “They are in Villeneuve. They are in Villeneuve-sur-Lot.”
“Who? Who is in Villeneuve-sur-Lot?” Sal had asked, and Edith replied, “Hannah and Herman.”
When Sal asked her if she was sure, she replied, “Yes, of course, I’m sure, Sal. I told you already. Didn’t I tell you yesterday?”
After that, it was simple. In the stone building that was the camp headquarters, Sal waited two hours to make his request to the camp commander. Without a word, the official stamped and initialed two travel permits to Villeneuve-sur-Lot. The next morning, Sal packed his musette, picked up Edith from her barracks, and led her out of Gurs.
Sal had become used to walking, and could have covered the ninety miles to Villeneuve in a week or ten days, but Edith was not strong and slowed him down. “Stop now,” she would say when she was weary, and nothing could move her.
When they finally reached the mountain village, they met Hannah’s friend, Madame Manyaka on the main street. Sal was so covered with dust and dirt that she almost did not recognize him. Edith responded to the woman’s hugs and kisses by breaking into tears, and Madame Manyaka said, “Come. I’ll take you to Hannah and Herman. They live on top of the hill.”
Now that he was within minutes of his destination, Sal was overwhelmed with weariness so that when Hannah opened the door, he uttered three sentences: “Here, I’ve brought Edith back to you. Where is my wife? Where are my children?” And, of course, Hannah told him.
I pictured the three of them, Sal unshaven and covered with dust, Edith beautiful in spite of her fatigue and hunger, and Hannah the welcoming hostess, pulling her guests into her home, sitting them in comfortable chairs, bringing cool drinks.
“I stayed in Villeneuve-sur-Lot just one night,” Sal said. “I had at least a hundred miles of walking in front of me to reach you. And every step of the way, I thanked God for guiding me in Hendaye, for making me see that if I did not flee to Spain but turned back, we would be reunited.”
“You are asking me to give up my children.”
All through the winter of 1940-41 at Montintin, I watched children coming and going. Before departing, the children would come into the kitchen, some skipping excitedly, the girls kissing me, and the boys vigorously pumping my hand. A lucky few received visas for North or South America. Others returned to parents or relatives living in France.
I knew them all. There were the boys who filled buckets with apples from our orchard. There were the ones who picked berries in the forest and brought them to the kitchen for me to make jams and compotes. There were the youngsters who chatted as they carried dirty dishes from the dining room into the kitchen. They were the children who came into my kitchen seeking solace from their loneliness.
They were also the hungry boys and girls who sneaked into my kitchen between meals hoping for some crumbs of bread or an apple; “Never mind, Madame Amalia, if it is bruised or wormy,” they said. More often than not, I had to refuse them, not because it was against the rules, which it was, but because I had nothing I could give them.
Rarely was there much advance notice that a child was leaving unless it involved the fifteen-year-olds. We all knew the French Underground came for these teenagers within a few weeks of their sixteenth birthday. It was their response to the Vichy government’s decision of October 1940 to arrest and intern all adult Jews who lived in the Unoccupied Zone of France. The edict defined anyone who had reached the age of sixteen as an adult.
The decree confused and upset me. Where could we hide? Where could we flee? How would the girls manage? Leaving my children was out of the question. Then, incredibly, the local government officials, without the authority to do so, promised to protect the staff from arrest. Sal and I were safe. I was safe because I was a staff member, and Sal was safe because the authorities did not know that he existed. Or so we thought. But how could I be content when our OSE homes received only a partial reprieve? For the village authorities did not, and could not, protect the Jewish children.
Fifteen-year-old girls and boys trod silently into the kitchen as though already in hiding. If I was busy, they would stand against the wall, waiting for me to notice them. Then I embraced them. What could I say to them except that they must trust God, that he would not abandon them. I told them I knew they would be brave. I promised to remember them, not forget who they really were. This last bit was important to the teenagers because the Underground was about to give them false identities—new names and new life histories—before placing them with sympathetic French families. Silently, I raged against the Nazis and their French collaborators. Each time a boy or a girl left, I
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