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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“Liselotte from Le Couret?” I asked.
Lea nodded. “She showed me how to pray. She showed me how to cross myself. She told me to watch her until I memorized when to kneel down during the mass.”
I stared at my daughter in shocked silence.
“Liselotte said it’s easy. I should do just what the others do. Kneel, pray, cross myself. But I had to remember it was just a game. We were only pretending because we are Jewish. She said we mustn’t forget.”
I said, “She was a good friend.”
Lea rubbed the white dots on the dominoes. “Liselotte explained about my name. She said it was another part of the secret that the nuns didn’t pronounce the ‘r’ at the end of my name. They called me Canne, not Kanner, to make me sound French. Liselotte told me I had to get used to it and to learn to write my name with a ‘C’ instead of a ‘K’. She said then no one will know who I am except her, and no one will guess that we are Jewish.”
Another day, while Lea was playing with a dog who lived on the farm, she said, “This is a nice farm, Mama. Before I was on another farm.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said.
“The nuns sent me,” Lea said. “They told me the people would be very nice, but I didn’t like them, I didn’t like it there because the soldiers came all the time. Once, the soldiers threw a man into the well.”
Aghast, I reached for my daughter’s hand. Lea’s eyes were filled with tears, but she went on. “When the farmer saw soldiers coming, he pushed me out of the house and told me to hide in the fields. I hid behind a tree near a cave and watched the soldiers. They had guns, and once they pushed a lot of people into the cave, Then they blocked the entrance, so the people couldn’t get out. The cave was very dark, and the people didn’t have any food. None of them ever came out. Those people died inside the cave.”
I put my arms around Lea and held her, thinking of her cowering behind a tree, alone. All the time I had worried only about my daughter’s physical safety. It had never occurred to me that a little child would be witness to such inhuman, ruthless brutality.
Monsieur Meyer moved his radio down from the attic, and we followed the progress of the troops in comfortable surroundings. In the north, the Allies reached Belgium at the beginning of September. Other troops fought to reach the Rhine and cross into Germany. In Central France, the fighting was over.
Monsieur Meyer decided there was no need to spend another winter on the farm. Late in the fall of 1944, he moved his household back to Limoges. I agreed to act as housekeeper in his seven-room, city apartment.
The hoard of sugar, flour and coffee was still not exhausted. I packed the scarce staples, and Monsieur Meyer took the supply back to the city. I was to follow him a few days after closing the country house.
When I was ready to leave, the tenant farmer who had brought eggs and butter through all the months of the war came with his wagon and loaded my few possessions on it. Then Lea and I climbed up and sat next to him. The horse began to pull the wagon down the shaded avenue that led to Limoges; the dog chased the wagon, in frenzied excitement.
A car came down the road from the opposite direction. The dog continued to race after the wagon. The car passed us; an instant after I realized that the driver had not seen the dog, the animal disappeared under the wheels of the car.
In a worried tone, Lea said, “I don’t see the dog anymore.”
I saw him. The animal lay on the side of the road, its lifeless, black body blending into the shadows made by the tall evergreens. The child had already witnessed so much death. Thank God, she had not seen the accident.
“Mama, where is the dog?” Lea asked.
“The dog went back to the farm, Lea,” I said. “He can’t come to the city with us.”
“Why not? Why can’t he?”
I uttered the first words that came into my head. “He has to stay behind to go to the village school.” The words made no sense to me, but Lea said nothing more. In the time she had been away, my inquisitive daughter had learned not to question bizarre explanations. At that moment, I gave thanks for that. In time, please God, she would return to her old self.
In Limoges, I enrolled Lea in the local public school. She was a diligent pupil, and before 1944 came to an end, she was at the head of her class.
As the winter of 1944-45 waned, the monstrous experiences of the two years Lea was hidden in the convent and on the farm faded from her memory. She liked books and games and got along well with the other children in her class. She seemed to be a happy, normal child, except that she could recall nothing of her life in France before the time when she came back to me.
“Look at my beautiful, grown-up daughters.”
When I returned to Limoges in October, 1944, I found that the city was completely safe, and that was a wonderful feeling. It took time to become used to this sense of freedom. For a decade, it had been essential for me to be watchful and wary in the street. The danger started at Halle, but Limoges had been particularly perilous for Sal and me. Now the Nazis were gone from Limoges and most of France. French people who had collaborated with them were ousted from power, vilified, and ostracized.
In this free environment, I took up my duties as housekeeper for Monsieur Meyer and his family. Lea and I shared a small room in the fourth floor attic of the building. Wherever I went, whether it was to bring Lea to school, to shop, or to see friends, I could walk without looking about or behind me. I relished wandering in the stores and markets even though shortages of food were still acute. People were no longer starving, though meats, fruit, coffee and sugar remained scarce.
I set out to renew my contacts with the people who had befriended and supported me in Limoges. On one of the first Sundays I was free from work, I visited Rabbi Deutsch who had put himself at risk every day, quietly helping us and other Jews during the years of Occupation.
The other person I was eager to see was Gita. She was now living in a rented apartment, less than an hour’s walk from Monsieur Meyer’s home. I set out to visit her, unprepared to hear that she had endured another dreadful loss.
After the Underground had informed her that she was under surveillance and ought to flee, she had many offers of shelter for herself and the four-year-old Anni. But no one would let her bring the baby. Everybody was afraid the infant’s crying would expose the presence of fugitives.
“What was I to do, Mia? I could not stay at our house, and I could not live in the street. I heard that one of the convents maintained an infant creche, and I took my baby there. I had to give him up. I had no choice,” she cried. She knew I would understand. I had been in the same painful situation.
Because the Nazis were looking for her, she was advised it would be safer if she did not go to visit her little son. The nuns promised to care for him, and she had no reason not to believe them. But something went wrong. The details were vague. Perhaps the bottles were improperly sterilized or the baby food somehow became contaminated. No one could say with certainty, but inexplicably the babies in the convent became ill, and some of them died. Gita’s little boy was one of a dozen infants who did not survive. He was barely one year old.
Our children were safe, thank God. We were sure of that, though there had been no word from or about Ruth and Eva for three years. As soon as I came back to Limoges, I tried to contact our daughters in America. But the war was not yet over, and civilian communications had not been reestablished.
By the autumn of 1944, Hitler’s armies had been all but driven out of France, and the Allies had only to cross the Rhine into Germany to complete the liberation. In the winter, Allied forces encountered fierce opposition in Belgium and suffered thousands of casualties in the Battle of the Bulge.
So I was sad and disappointed but not surprised that we received no reply to any any of the letters we wrote to the girls in New York. I did not believe mail was going through. Sal was convinced there was another reason. He thought he might not have remembered the addresses in New York correctly. He knew of only one way to check.
In February of 1945, he decided to go back to Le Couret to search for papers we had left behind in our room when we were arrested. Walking towards the summerhouse, he encountered the farmer in whose hayloft we had spent the nights while we were hiding in the forest.
“I am very happy to see you!” the Frenchman said. “I was sure you were killed!” He walked with Sal to our old quarters and said no one else had lived in the one-room summerhouse that had been ours. Cobwebs were everywhere in the room, but nothing had been moved. Sal found our old box and his worn leather case. All his papers were still there.
When he returned, we took the list of addresses to the International Red Cross and asked them not only to find Ruth and Eva in New York but also to search for our missing relatives. In the spring of 1945, the Red Cross located and contacted Ruth and Eva in New York City.
A letter came from our girls. It was written in awkward, misspelled German. I wanted to know everything about them and found their letters much too brief. They were formal in an unexpected way. Had they forgotten most of their German, I wondered, or could they have forgotten us? They were well, they wrote, and were eager to be reunited with Mama, Papa and Lea.
The letters were accompanied by a black and white photograph of two smiling young ladies, standing in a park. I could not take my eyes off the shiny black and white photograph. They were my daughters, but I did not know them. These girls bore no resemblance to the children I had sent to America four years ago. I knew nothing about them. I tried to imagine how they lived, what kind of friends they had, what they did for pleasure. Seeking clues, I read and re-read the letters but found little that helped me identify these grown-up girls with the children I had sent to America. Yet they were mine.
I carried the photograph with me and proudly showed it to everyone I met, saying, “Look at my beautiful, grown-up daughters.”
On April 30, Hitler committed suicide. The Nazi surrender came on May 8, 1945. It was universally called V.E. Day, which stood for Victory in Europe. In Limoges wild, spontaneous celebrations erupted in the streets, followed by a formal civic gala that culminated in a fabulous display of fireworks.
We were part of
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