Alex's Wake Read online

  As I struggled to make sense of my unfamiliar place in the universe and to come to terms with my sorrow, one certainty seemed to wrap itself comfortingly around me, as if I’d slipped on a well-worn flannel shirt on a cold morning. I would once again write a book about my family. The family had been reduced to all but nothing, but I would do my best to see that it lived on. I would tell the story of my Grandfather Alex and Uncle Helmut, of their journey on the St. Louis and their unhappy odyssey through France. Having lost my father and my brother, I would write about my father’s father and his brother. Perhaps I was trying to cling to what had slipped away forever. But whatever the source of my decision, I told myself that I would write the book so that it could be completed by the day I, too, reached sixty. I didn’t have much time.

  I began by paying several visits to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the immense building on the National Mall in Washington, solemnly designed to suggest a concentration camp. I knew that Alex and Helmut had landed in France in June 1939 and that they’d arrived in the Rivesaltes concentration camp in January 1941, but where and how they had passed those interim eighteen months remained a mystery.

  In 1941, a helpful French functionary filled out these cards that, seventy years later, provided me with invaluable clues regarding my grandfather and uncle’s journey through France. Note the handwritten cities listed just below the line marked Nationalite.

  (Courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

  But then, while poring over microfilm in the museum’s library, I made an intriguing discovery. Examining the information in the section given over to Camp de Rivesaltes, I found the cards that an efficient French functionary had filled out to mark the transference of my grandfather and uncle from that camp to their next destination, Camp des Milles, in July 1941. In addition to noting their names, hometowns, professions, dates of birth, and the names of their nearest relatives, my unknown helper of seven decades earlier had also written in the words “Boulogne,” “Montauban,” “Agde,” and “Rivesaltes.” Boulogne and Rivesaltes I knew, respectively, to be the names of the town where Alex and Helmut had landed in France and the hellish camp near the Pyrenees, but what of the other two?

  A little breathlessly, I called over a museum staffer. She furrowed her brow and then brightened. “Why, Agde was another camp, also in the south of France, near the Mediterranean. And Montauban . . . that’s a town in the south of France, near Toulouse. Those must have been your relatives’ last known addresses before their arrival in Rivesaltes!” Montauban was not a concentration or refugee camp, but it was possible that my grandfather and uncle had been held there, maybe hidden there, after the start of the war in September 1939. More mystery.

  I went home and confirmed that Montauban is indeed a city in southern France, the capital of the departement of Tarn-et-Garonne, located about thirty miles north of Toulouse. I also learned that it proudly proclaims itself the sister city of Pawhuska, Oklahoma. On a whim, I placed a call the next day to Pawhuska’s city hall and asked for the person in charge of the sister-city program. “Oh, that’s Jack Shoemate. . . . Here’s his number. . . . He’ll be happy to talk to you.” I hung up, profoundly grateful, and not for the first time, for the easygoing friendliness of small-town American ways.

  Mr. Shoemate was eager to talk about Pawhuska’s sister city in far-off France, and more than happy to give me the e-mail address of his primary contact in Montauban, Jean-Claude Drouilhet. I immediately wrote to M. Drouilhet to ask him what, if anything, he knew about foreign Jews who might have been held in Montauban in the early days of World War II. I was delighted when M. Drouilhet responded almost immediately, excited when he declared that my subject was of extreme importance to him, and thrilled when he wrote again a few days later to tell me that he’d gone to police headquarters in Montauban and had unearthed some information sure to be of interest to me. He had digitally photographed his discoveries and attached them to his e-mail. I clicked them open . . . and there were two more cards, similar to those filled out at Rivesaltes, these dominated by a large red letter J carved in blood, it seemed, in the upper left. Again I read the usual details of Alex and Helmut’s birthdays, professions, and the names of their relatives, but here was a line that listed where they’d been prior to their arrival in Montauban. On the line was written clearly “Martigny-les-Bains.” Another clue!

  Within days, I had confirmed with an archivist at the Holocaust Museum that, yes, a number of St. Louis refugees who’d disembarked in France had been taken to Martigny-les-Bains, a village in the northeast that had enjoyed a degree of prosperity at the turn of the twentieth century as a spa town with renowned healing waters. Just why Alex and Helmut had been brought there remained a bit of a mystery, but now the course of their journey through France had become clearer.

  Then, as the long winter began to wane and the days began to lengthen, with their promise of another spring and its infinite possibilities, my grandfather and uncle’s itinerary began to burn itself into my brain with an improbable urgency. Boulogne-to-Martigny-to-Montauban-to-Agde-to-Rivesaltes-to-Les Milles-to-Drancy-to-Auschwitz. That list of names became as familiar to me as my own address and telephone number. Late one night, it came to me what I must do: I knew that I needed to retrace their steps, to set foot on the earth they trod during those final three years of initial hope and eventual hopelessness, to see what they saw and to breathe the air they breathed before they breathed their last. I would tell their story as a grandson, a nephew, and an eyewitness.

  Their stories were more than their last years, however, so I decided to begin my journey where my grandfather started his, the little village of Sachsenhagen in Germany’s Lower Saxony. I would then travel to Oldenburg, where Alex established his business and where Günther and Helmut were born, and then to Hamburg, where the St. Louis began its unhappy voyage. I would then cross the Low Countries to meet up metaphorically with Alex and Helmut when they landed in Boulogne-sur-Mer, and from there follow them along their winding road to Auschwitz.

  Though I share my father’s love of trains, it seemed to me that the nature of this journey would require a car. I consulted a map. Adding up the distances I was able to estimate between destinations, I concluded that I would be traveling a minimum of thirty-five hundred miles, more than a drive across the United States from east to west. Given the time I would reasonably need in each city, I decided that the trip would last about six weeks.

  The journey began to take on a life of its own, becoming a force that seemed to be willing me onward, dominating my thoughts by day and my dreams by night. I found myself exhilarated by the prospect one minute and then consumed by fears and doubts the next. My greatest fear was that I would fly home from Europe at the end of the six weeks thinking to myself, “Well, that was a colossal waste of time!” I also feared coming face to face with the daily record of my family’s descent into death, and I wondered just how I would find my way through the heart of Europe with my limited German and my nearly nonexistent French. And I was fully conscious of the immense contrast between Alex and Helmut’s journey and mine, how they had been prisoners caught in a Kafkaesque quagmire of bureaucracy, indifference, and cruelty; what they had to endure as their rations were reduced and they lost weight and hope; and how I would be traveling in an air-conditioned car, staying in lovely hotels, with all of France’s celebrated cuisine at my fingertips. Was this quest of mine in some fashion a monstrous game of dress-up and make-believe, not so much a tribute to my grandfather and uncle as a mockery of their suffering?

  Just weeks before my departure, I asked my wife if she would accompany me on this grand adventure, to temper my fears and also to share in the pleasures of the experience, the new sights, sounds, and tastes we would surely encounter on the road. “Grief can take care of itself,” wrote Mr. Twain, “But to get full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.” She said yes, bless her.

  So, on Tuesday, May 10, 2011, we set forth. I took a
long small photographs of Alex and Helmut, a single suitcase, and a small box containing my father’s ashes, a box that had spent the previous two years in the shadows of an upstairs closet. It was time, I’d decided, for Günther to make his return to his cherished homeland. I also packed the fervent hope that in the coming six weeks, I might learn much about the ordeal of my grandfather and uncle, yet also find a way to set down my family’s long-borne burden, to steer my way out of the churning turbulence of Alex’s wake into the calm and peaceful waters of my living family, my friends, and my life.

  It was a beautiful clear evening as our 757 climbed to thirty-nine thousand feet along the eastern seaboard on its navigational path from Washington to Europe. Gazing down over the sprawling boroughs of New York City, I had an unhindered view of the Statue of Liberty and neighboring Ellis Island. My parents had roused themselves at 4:00 a.m. to catch their first glimpse of Miss Liberty’s welcoming torch when they arrived safely in America in 1941. Alex and Helmut had found the golden door shut firmly against them two years earlier. I pondered those two journeys that I could almost see far below me and the fate that had intervened in both, and as we bent our way east into the gathering night and my latest voyage into that land of mystery we call the past, I recalled the words of Martin Buber: “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.”

  2

  Sachsenhagen

  WEDNESDAY, MAY 11, 2011. We land in Switzerland. Writing from Interlachen 120 years earlier, Mr. Twain called Switzerland “the cradle of liberty” and enthused that “it is healing and refreshing to breathe air that has known no taint of slavery for six hundred years.” But we grounded our choice of this country as the starting point of our journey more in practicality than idealism. After following my uncle and grandfather for what we assume will be a fairly harrowing venture, we plan to decompress at a splendid old hotel in the Swiss Alps that was a favorite destination of Amy’s uncle, so we chose Zürich as our landing site.

  At the airport, we wheel our bags through the maze of corridors and duty-free shops to the rental car counter, where we are given possession of a sleek silver Opel Meriva. My first order of business is to borrow a single strip of adhesive tape from the rental desk, which I use to affix the small photos of Alex and Helmut to a space just above the Meriva’s rearview mirror. With this physical reminder of our journey’s purpose set firmly before us, we are now ready to begin. I note the odometer’s figure of 1,063 kilometers, and we set out into Zürich’s daunting traffic, heading west.

  The great Irish writer James Joyce, who left Dublin for good when he was thirty years old, moved to Zürich in 1915 and spent the rest of the Great War there working on his epic retelling of the story of Ulysses, the immortal wanderer. In 1940, Joyce fled Paris in advance of the Nazi invasion and returned to Zürich, where he died in January 1941 of a perforated ulcer. He is buried in Zürich’s Fluntern Cemetery, hard by the city’s zoo. Joyce’s widow, Nora Barnacle, declared of her husband, “He was awfully fond of the lions—I like to think of him lying there and listening to them roar.” On this sunny May morning, we see signs for the zoo but, alternately fighting fatigue and pumping adrenaline, we make our determined way to the Swiss expressway A3, which in turn takes us over cow-dotted hills and through long winding tunnels toward Basel. Just east of Basel, we cross the legendary River Rhine and enter my ancestral homeland, speeding north.

  Our route skirts the edge of the Black Forest, where Alex would take his family on vacations to such lovely spa towns as Baden-Baden and Eisenbach. Every now and then, we spy castles perched precariously yet triumphantly on the brow of jagged hills, reminding us that we are not rolling along a familiar American interstate. We pass Karlsruhe, where my father lived as a young student and where he received his fateful summons to join the Kulturbund, and maneuver our way around Frankfurt, where my parents met and first lived together as young musicians in love. Amy, embracing her navigator duties with vigor, announces that the town of Giessen, about fifty kilometers ahead, appears to be a promising destination. We leave the autobahn, creep our way into Giessen, and on only our second attempt, find a perfectly serviceable inn in which to pass the night. We enjoy a light Abendbrot, or evening snack, take a brief walk in the farmland on the edge of town, then return to our inn and fall into bed. It’s been a long day and a half since our departure, but we’re on the road and very satisfied with our initial progress.

  Our first full day in Europe dawns cloudy, and as we resume our way north our view of the countryside occasionally yields to a thick fog. We endure hours of autobahns, with heavy trucks making our plucky little Meriva shiver and vibrate as we maneuver around them and shiny black Audis and Mercedes-Benzes whizzing past us at 150 kph on their hip yet efficient way to Berlin and Leipzig. Finally, a little past noon, we leave the thundering traffic for a more peaceful two-lane highway, which takes us gently to the lovely town of Bückeburg, the site of the official archives of the German state of Lower Saxony. We have arrived in the land of my forebears.

  Lower Saxony is the second largest and fourth most populous of the sixteen states of Germany. It covers much of the territory of the ancient Kingdom of Hannover, which has supplied royalty to both Germany and, since the eighteenth century, England. Lower Saxony appeals to me geographically because it borders more neighboring states (nine) than any other German state, in much the same way that my birth state of Missouri borders more states (eight) than any other American state. It’s largely agricultural land, producing wheat, potatoes, rye, and poultry, and featuring the sort of sandy soil that fosters grasslands, the raising of cattle, and the breeding of horses. Indeed, the Lower Saxony coat of arms is a red shield on which rears a white Saxon steed. Horses played a large role in my family throughout the nineteenth century, and I’ve come to Bückeburg, a town about fifteen miles southwest of Alex’s birthplace of Sachsenhagen, to learn what I can about how the Goldschmidts lived.

  Once the capital city of the tiny municipality of Schaumburg-Lippe, Bückeburg today is within the borders of Schaumburg, a district of Lower Saxony. In 1750, the year Johann Sebastian Bach died, Prince Wilhelm von Schaumburg-Lippe recruited the great man’s ninth son, Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach, to come to Bückeburg as court harpsichordist, where he stayed, writing keyboard sonatas, chamber music, symphonies, and oratorios, until his death in 1795. Present-day Bückeburg boasts a helicopter museum containing early drawings of flying machines by Leonardo da Vinci, in addition to forty working helicopters. But our destination on this still-overcast Thursday afternoon is the ornate Bückeburg Palace, a yellow castle with turrets and fountains and gently manicured gardens that for over seven hundred years has been the official residence of the princes of Schaumburg-Lippe. We enter a side tower of the palace, climb stairs past royal red walls hung with portraits of generations of Schaumburg-Lippe royalty, until we come to the archive reading room.

  Dr. Hendrick Weingarten of the Bückeburg Archives, with whom I struck up an Internet correspondence some weeks ago, meets us here. He arranges for several immense leather-bound tomes to be brought to us from the dusty depths of the castle holdings. We all stand silently when three aides enter the reading room bearing their burden of books and the many years, lives, and events contained within them. When the hands that wrote these documents passed over the pages and left their trails of ink, human beings still measured distances by how far a horse could pull a carriage in a day, flight was reserved for the winged creatures of the air, the telegraph was the new means of communication, and at night people lit their lives with fire. I am holding a folder of yellowing but still stoutly legible papers contained in a soft blue binder tied together by a forest-green ribbon. And there before me, on a page dated 10 January 1879, is the notice that in the hamlet of Sachsenhagen, on the first day of January in the year one thousand eight hundred seventy-nine at six o’clock in the morning, was delivered to Moses and Auguste Goldschmidt a male baby whose first name was Alexander.

  My grandf
ather, whom I have come all this way to save, has been born.

  THE HISTORY OF SACHSENHAGEN goes back to the thirteenth century, when it was a lonely cluster of houses and barns existing in the shadow of a grand moated castle built by the reigning duke of Saxony to secure the countryside from thieves, cutpurses, highwaymen, and other lowlifes of those Dark Ages. It was then a swampy region located along an old trading route running southwest to northeast, roughly the same path as today’s B65 federal highway. Both castle and hamlet are first mentioned in local chronicles in the year 1253; forty-four years later, in 1297, the castle changed hands as the result of a dispute over an unpaid dowry.

  By the beginning of the seventeenth century, Sachsenhagen had become a rural center for farmers, merchants, traders, and craftsmen. A great fire swept through its thatched-roofed wooden buildings in 1619, nearly destroying the entire village, sparing only the Rathaus, or city hall, and a single tower from the medieval castle. But the town persevered, rebuilt, and on March 1, 1650, was granted the honor of being designated an official Stadt, or city, rather than a mere hamlet. It must have been a gala day, full of pomp and pageantry, when Her Highness the Countess Amalie Elizabeth von Hessen, daughter of His Highness Philip Ludwig II, Count of Hanau-Münzenberg, swept into Sachsenhagen to sign the royal decree allowing the newly minted city to build its own church, hold three grand market fairs each year, and design and maintain its own coat of arms.

  For years, Sachsenhagen belonged to the holdings of Schaumburg-Lippe; then in the mid-seventeenth century, it was annexed by the Hessian principality. Finally, in 1974, it became part of the district of Schaumburg. Today it can boast the honor of being the second-smallest city in all of Lower Saxony, with a population of about two thousand souls.