This is the story of Carola Rossmann, a middle-aged widow who is left behind with her elderly mother and former housekeeper as others of her family leave. They promise her she will follow them as soon as needed documents can be obtained. With the onset of World War II, her situation changes. She is ultimately abandoned inside Germany to face her own fate. In this setting, Carola establishes a dangerous relationship with a gentile man that provides her respite, comfort, and even pleasure. The tortuous path she embarks on results in a corrosive conflict created by the paradox of her Aryan appearance and her Jewish soul. The relentless acts of dehumanization alternately raise and dash her hopes during her last years in the city. When Jewish life is finally brought to a halt, the entire community is trapped in place and deported. The SS robs them of their belongings and uses their own assets to exterminate them. With few exceptions all of this takes place while the citizenry stands by, unwilling to interfere with the atrocities they are witnessing.
IN FULL VIEW
By JOSEPH FATHiUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2010 JOSEPH FATH
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4401-9039-1Contents
Preface............................................................ixAcknowledgments....................................................xiii1 A Tearful Departure.............................................12 Reflections on a Marriage.......................................63 A Decade of Descent.............................................164 Deception and Betrayal..........................................295 An Unanticipated Opportunity....................................346 Coffee..........................................................627 Eviction........................................................768 A New Face......................................................979 Dinner and an Encore............................................10910 The Darkness of War-the Feast of Lights.........................11911 A Letter from the East..........................................13012 The New Year 1940...............................................13713 Victory in Poland...............................................14114 Another Cup of Coffee...........................................14415 Doubts, Further Deception, and Diversion........................14716 A Different Night-the Seder of the Remnants.....................17017 1940-the War Nearly Over?.......................................18918 More Persecution................................................19419 The Eastern Front Ignites.......................................20020 The Yellow Star-the Ultimate Deception..........................20821 The End of an Imagined Dynasty..................................22222 1942-the Other Shoe Drops.......................................23123 Goodbye, My Husband.............................................25024 Preparing to Leave..............................................25525 Leaving the Sanctuary...........................................26026 Die Anstaendigen (The Decent Ones)..............................26927 The Witnesses...................................................27928 Final Blows-an Ill-timed Encounter..............................28729 Why?............................................................30230 Verschollen (Vanished)..........................................309
Chapter One
A TEARFUL DEPARTURE
March 10, 1939: a damp and intense cold of winter's end relentlessly penetrated all who needed to be outside their heated homes. Carola Rossmann and her daughter Trudi stepped off the trolley car at the Hauptbahnhof, the main railroad station of the city, rushing inside quickly to avoid the chill that gripped those in the plaza in front of the building. They had each been lost in the silence of pain of their last hour together. All they seemed to be able to express had been said to each other during the beginning of their ride to the station. The haunting echo of love from the two remaining members of the Seidenberger family they had left behind an hour earlier in the dilapidated apartment on the Unterlindau reverberated steadily inside each of them. Once inside the station's track area, they embraced tearfully and held on to each other with the force of unconditional love between mother and daughter that has no equal among any other relationships. As the tears flowed freely down their cheeks, the finality of their separation finally sank in. The hands on the large clock facing the tracks in the departure hall read 21:40, twenty minutes before the train would leave for Brussels, Belgium. There was only the drone of remote people noises, the calls of train dispatchers announcing imminent departures, and the hissing of steam from the cylinders of impatient coal-fired engines waiting to push their passenger trains backward out of the station.
Carola mused to herself how Trudi was leaving her family now, having, in turn, been left behind not long ago by her new husband, David Stern. They had quietly been married some weeks earlier in a brief ceremony at the town hall. It had been a civil ceremony because rabbis of his Orthodox Frankfurt congregation were no longer legally entitled to officiate at religious weddings. Therefore, the newlyweds were anxiously awaiting the religious ceremony that was to be held at the synagogue David joined in Brussels upon his arrival. He had left quickly, having had his exit permits to Belgium ready two weeks before the wedding in order to reestablish himself in the jewelry business with the help of supportive friends.
Trudi and David each explained to Carola that their Brussels move was part of a plan of escape devised by his friends of the erstwhile Friedberger Anlage congregation, organized in the manner of an underground railroad. As each new arrival in Belgium had quickly been employed by one of the previous arrivals, one of them then gave a personal guarantee of support by demonstrating to the authorities that he or she would not be a burden to the state in return for receiving Belgian immigration papers. Both Trudi and David impressed Carola with the fact that in this way strong ties formed between old and new friends at the Brussels Jewish community. In turn, people were often given the opportunity to bring additional members of their own families into the country. They regarded the Belgian residence as a temporary respite from which they could consider further emigration moves to England, Palestine, or North or South America.
This mutual, informal aid society formed the basis of the strongest of bonds which were to last the entire lives of the Belgian migrs as the reciprocal, often life-saving favors could never be fully repaid. The plan was also the basis of Trudi's promise to her mother to extricate her as quickly as possible from the constantly tightening noose forming around the remaining Jewish community in Frankfurt as their numbers shrank and their collective financial resources for self-help began to be taken away by the SS authorities at an ever accelerating rate.
"Mutti, don't cry," she said through her own tears. "It won't be long before David and I will send for you-just as soon as the paperwork is complete and we have found a small apartment in Brussels adequate for the three of us."
As they approached the gate, Carola and her daughter Trudi separated quietly. The young woman reached into her pocketbook to pull out and present her exit papers to the indifferent gatekeeper at track number fourteen near the center of the twenty-four-track departure lineup. She continued to look back at her mother as she quickly marched toward an open compartment door in the middle of the ten-car train. As she mounted the steps to a nearly empty compartment, she turned for one last time to wave to her mother, blowing her a kiss of departure that struck with such an emotional force of consolation that it dried Carola's cheeks and made her wave back with a wan smile and a look of contained courage. The doors finally closed as the conductors gave their last boarding shouts, orders, and other incomprehensible instructions and stepped on the sideboards at the end of the cars to disappear into the train's innards at the last second. The black, sooty engine came alive at last as its pistons, connected by a strong, convoluted system of rods and pinions, began to move its large load out of the station. The cold air of winter condensed and recondensed the steam emanating from seemingly everywhere, and the train disappeared quickly out from under the glass roof, which had been smudged with soot and other accumulated dirt during the many years of nonexistent cleaning and poor maintenance.
Carola Rossmann turned quickly, resolute to walk away, but was briefly stopped by involuntarily recurring bursts of tears and shudders as she began to contemplate what she was to face from this moment on. The words, "Mutti, David and I will send for you as soon as everything is prepared," rang in her head with fading power, her gut instinct telling her otherwise and doubt and disbelief taking the place of the optimism they had both pretended to themselves and to each other.
The teary goodbye she had just gone through had been preceded by a similar scene an hour and a half earlier when she and Trudi had left the apartment, embracing Trudi's grandmother and Leah Rosenthal, Esther Seidenberger's companion, for a similar last time in their old, run-down family home. The cries and wailings were louder and more unrestrained, particularly of her grandmother and more modestly those of Leah, who had essentially helped raise Trudi from her early years on. Despite promises to Grandma, which everyone knew were hollow and might never materialize, the old woman, now nearly seventy, was inconsolable and seemed in her unintelligible outbursts to recall all of the important events of their lives together that randomly occurred to her through her grief.
To make matters more painful and sad, Carola had gone through the same scene some six weeks prior to this day when her younger daughter, Lisa, had similarly departed for America by taking a train to Hamburg for the first leg of her ocean voyage on the German liner Bremen. On that vessel she was able to get passage for a modest one-way ticket in a shared cabin near the steerage quarter of the ocean liner. Of course, this too had been a teary, difficult separation, although at that time in early January, her older daughter accompanied them. Trudi projected a more stoic, matter-of-fact, and accepting mien, which, when combined with the more optimistic, confident spirit (perhaps artificial and contrived) and the more jocular nature of Lisa, helped their mother overcome her grief more easily than she presently experienced it. The total sense of loss of both children that this departure represented made her whole body sag to near the point of total collapse.
Carola slowly walked back through a swinging door that suppressed noise, steam, and soot by separating the departure hall from the outer arrival area. As she went outside into the cold night, she contemplated the prospect of "and now there were three," as in the children's book Ten Little Indians, which she had read to her daughters in years past. In this case, it felt more like they who had to remain were worn out remnants in that there were two tired, elderly women and one whose youthfulness was fast fading into middle age.
In her own mind, she saw a picture even more pathetic. Her husband had died in 1935 of a serious kidney ailment. She was therefore a widow, well preserved but now totally abandoned by her entire small family after a life of major misfortunes without letup. Somehow, there had always been needs, poverty, silent recriminations, and a constant heaviness of life that never seemed to lift. Their mark of distinction and sorrow was that the entire family felt ever pursued by a tragic assault on their Jewishness. She was trying to imagine life while the government's campaign of hate was infecting her neighbors and all of life around them. Before the Nazi takeover, the then constant wishes, demands, emergencies, tendernesses, and fights with first innocent and then exuberant children around, had kept everyone distracted and often removed from the preoccupations of their increasingly desperate situation.
Ever since the infamous Kristallnacht of November 9, 1938, four months earlier, it had become hauntingly clear that an end to a functioning Jewish community was at hand. All evening long on that fateful night they had looked out the window from a darkened room to the police station across the street to witness the roundup of many men in the neighborhood as they were herded onto open trucks to be taken away to concentration camps. A community, now nearly eight hundred years old and an integral part of the citizenry-for better or for worse-living of late in free association with the surrounding Gentile world, had finally achieved emancipation and slowly took up residence in more distantly diverse areas from the original Jewish neighborhoods.
The community as a whole was eager to complete the process of integration in a civil, legal, and tolerant manner, striving to create a culturally advanced citizenry that could jointly build a diverse society that would shed prejudice, hatred, and the other evils of old.
Though the chancre of anti-Semitism had continued simmering beneath the surface during the past fifty-some-odd years, a number of prominent civil- and activist-minded Jews had successfully inserted themselves into the political fabric of the Frankfurt societal structure. That illusion was finally shattered, however, and the bubble of delusion under which they were now beginning to conduct their daily lives had finally burst in 1933. It was nearly impossible to accept the fact that their only recently created Frankfurt Jewish world had so suddenly and permanently changed and now appeared to be ending as the inculcated experience and environment had conditioned the Jewish population to accept its inevitable demise.
As she walked outside, Carola tucked her scarf tightly into her well-worn coat, which had not been replaced in more than ten years. She boarded the trolley car that had arrived in front of the Bahnhofplatz, trembling as much from fear as from the cold, damp weather surrounding her.
Chapter Two
REFLECTIONS ON A MARRIAGE
As soon as she found a seat in the second car as far away as possible from the potentially hostile glances of tired passengers returning from their day's work, Carola lost herself in her own thoughts, delving a long way into the last twenty-some-odd years of her difficult life. It was not in a mood of self-pity but rather an intense review commingled with nostalgia, which arose with Trudi's departure.
She was totally absorbed in her own new situation. First of all, she had been left behind, after her brother and his small family made the decision to emigrate to the United States. They had gone about it, at first, with measured deliberation. Then, after a flurry of final preparations when the details had been worked out, the three of them were gone by September 1938. Her brother, Dr. Eduard Seidenberger, was three years younger than she and was sent by her parents to medical school after his graduation from the Realgymnasium in 1912. As a girl she did not continue her education because she was only an average student, and in those days only young women of unusual brilliance and academic record were admitted to advanced professional training. Her brother, on the other hand, after a prolonged study of medicine interrupted by World War I, had established a practice of gynecology and in the course of the past fifteen years had acquired an excellent reputation among his peers and patients.
Following the ascent of the Hitler government to power and the boycott of April 1933, during which two Storm Troopers parked themselves in front of his office and discouraged his patients from entering, and the subsequent loss of health insurance reimbursements by the government agencies then in place throughout Germany, he had begun to conclude that future prospects for Jewish physicians were dim. This, despite assurances that as a World War I veteran and officer in the German army he would be exempt from any ostracism, refusal of access to public hospitals, and other financial deprivations. He had, therefore, chosen to look around for countries that might have a freer environment where he and his family could reestablish themselves, and he could resume his medical practice.
His wife Eva, ten years his junior, came from an affluent merchant family in the Rhineland who assured her that she would have nothing to worry about financially, even if her own family income became less due to the new restrictive laws and covenants. They told her that there would be enough money generated by their department store business to take care of her family as well. What they did not realize was that part of Eduard's income went to the support of his own father's family. This was kept confidential so as not to make her family feel they were merely funneling funds through to people to whom they did not feel particularly close.
Toward the end of 1933, Eduard took his wife Eva on an exploratory trip to London to see if she was willing to move to England and resume a new life. He had gone to boarding school in Manchester for a year before the outbreak of World War I, had learned the language, and was in general an Anglophile, greatly admiring the ways of the British lifestyle, the jauntiness, and the matter-of-fact "stiff upper lip" manner of the British people. The trip, as it turned out, was a tactical mistake. The weather in November was miserable, and during their stay, it rained without end. It was cold and damp, which was anathema to Eva's well-being, and the darkness from three in the afternoon until nine o'clock the next morning at that time of year was very depressing to her. She therefore opposed leaving her comfortable house, and they returned without making any decisions. He subsequently explored going to America where he had an uncle, Hugo Seidenberger, who (after being expelled from the family residence in Hemsbach for a transgression that was kept a deep, dark family secret) had been sent to America where he married, raised a family, and established himself as a small businessman in the textile manufacturing business.
After many letters back and forth and interminable paperwork, by the end of 1935 Dr. Seidenberger received consent from the German government to leave the country. In turn, his uncle submitted an affidavit of support to the American government guaranteeing that his nephew would not be a charge and a burden to the public sector. Toward the latter part of 1936, he had at last been able to leave for the United States to study for his medical exams so that he could obtain a license to resume his practice of gynecology. He had taken only a very modest sum of money with him, augmented by a semivaluable stamp collection and a Leica camera to sell in case of an emergency, hoping that he could live and board with his uncle's family until his earning power was reasonably restored. Because he was unable to provide for his own family without resuming his medical practice, his wife Eva and son Stefan needed to remain behind, living in very modest circumstances to conserve sufficient funds until their own departure. This finally occurred in the late summer of 1938 and effectively removed both financial and psychological support from Eduard's mother Esther, Leah, his sister Carola, and his nieces.
Before leaving in 1936, having spent the year obtaining the necessary permits and visas and arranging his business affairs, Eduard had given Carola comfort by assuring her that he and his uncle would send for their mother, and Leah to help them immigrate to the United States. The entire Seidenberger/Rossmann family, young and old, could then resume a new life together in the New World. Separation was to be regarded as temporary and faced with courage and determination, as an investment toward a good life together within a short span of time.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from IN FULL VIEWby JOSEPH FATH Copyright © 2010 by JOSEPH FATH. Excerpted by permission.
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