In another photo, there sits my father sharing a joke with his first cousin and best childhood pal, Walter. They were born in the same village and were like brothers. As young boys they fought together against anti-Semitic bullies. Walter too was deported to an internment camp in southern France where he also lost both his parents. He too escaped to fight in the French Resistance. They lost contact during the war, but toward its end they miraculously bumped into each other on a street in Strasbourg, France. In 1946 they sailed on the same liberty ship into New York harbor and a new life. Walter married a Brooklyn-born girl, Henrietta.
Present at my bar mitzvah were two more of my father’s cousins. These were both daughters of his favorite uncle Marx, who was shot by the Nazis. They are pictured in a photo, the elder Flora with her husband Gustav and the younger Irma, a widow for some years. I knew them as doting relatives who always pinched our cheeks when greeting us and used strange words like “wunderbar,” but I never knew the heart-searing drama of their wartime lives. Flora and Gustav had a handicapped child who was murdered in the early 1930s under the Nazis’ “mercy killing” program that sought to rid the Reich of cripples and “non-productive” citizens. Heartbroken, they had immigrated to New York.
Irma’s husband Benno had owned a porcelain factory on the German-Czech border. At the war’s start, they fled Europe. On a ferryboat they sailed down the Danube River and later transferred to one of three boats attempting to reach Palestine. In another cynical propaganda ploy, the Nazis had permitted the boats to leave Europe to demonstrate that no other nation would freely accept Jews – and they were right. Near Haifa, British marines forced the Jews off their boats and onto the Patria, an aging ocean liner converted to a prison ship. The British were planning to sail it to Mauritius, their island colony off East Africa, where the refugees would be interned in prison camps out of the limelight. Haganah fighters, seeking to foil the British plan, placed explosives in the Patria to delay its departure.
The plot went disastrously wrong when the explosives proved too powerful and the boat quickly sank, drowning 217 Jewish souls. The remainder, including Benno and Irma, were plucked out of the Mediterranean but the heartless British refused to let them go free; they were interned at the Atlit detention camp near Haifa for a number of months.
Upon their release they went to Tel Aviv where Irma worked as a childcare provider and Benno as a metal worker. Their ordeal had shattered Benno’s health, however, and in 1949, with Irma longing to reunite with her sister and other family members, they immigrated to New York. Irma flourished in America and enjoyed a long, active life until her death in 2007 at age 101.
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Seeing the faces of relatives gone so long and now understanding all they endured caused my sister and me to lapse into silence. How strong, how loving, how compassionate they had remained in the face of German tyranny. They had truly been victors.
Almost as if on cue, the next photos we found caused us to laugh aloud in remembered delight. They immortalized what to us had been the high point of the bar mitzvah reception. But it was only now as adults that we could grasp the true meaning and significance of the emotion-packed moment.
The band had just finished a medley of joyous tunes that ended with a drum roll. When that too fell silent, the bandleader picked up the microphone and announced, in a rich baritone voice, “And now the reason we are all here – the bar mitzvah boy Eddie, son of Kurt and Giselle!” It was overwhelming moment but I was about to be even more overwhelmed. All the adults in the reception hall rose to their feet as one and began clapping, a rousing ovation punctuated by cries of “mazel tov” and “l’chaim.”
