Leaving Europe

The lore of my father's and grandparent's escape from Germany is so powerful it's like an implanted memory. I feel I was there the day my grandmother took my toddler father to their usual playground in Berlin and found that overnight a sign had sprouted saying "No Dogs or Jews Allowed." I can see her standing there reading the sign, the little boy beside her pulling at her hand so that she will take him to the swings, disappointed when they turn around, and then thrilled when they get on the trolley and go out to the country where he can play freely in the woods. I am on the last train out of Berlin in 1941, or perhaps it's the last ship out of Lisbon. I am in Bermuda with my father, clutching the teddy bear someone has given him, the little Jewish boy escaping the Nazis.

My grandparents were prosperous, assimilated Berliners--my grandfather was a lawyer, my grandmother went to lectures by Adler, not Freud, but you get the picture. The rest of his many siblings had long since immigrated, but my grandfather was sure that things would be fine. His daughter left for Palestine with her boyfriend. His older son went to relatives in New York. But he stayed, and then my father was born.

As my grandmother told it, the sign at the playground was a turning point, but of course it must have been more complicated. Another piece of the story, that doesn't quite fit for me chronologically, is that my grandfather's brothers in New York would not sponsor him because he was a Zionist. Some of the elders in their community (what elders? what community? these were assimilated businessmen and doctors, not yeshiva buchers out of the shtetl) called them out on it.

Somebody must have sponsored them at some point, or perhaps they got out some other way. I need to reread the memoir my grandmother wrote. I need to ask my father, though his memories are cloudy, by virtue of youth and personality. But there must have been letters and cables, back and forth from Berlin to New York, as my grandfather finally realized the seriousness of the situation and tried to get the rest of his family out.

I don't think about this much. I'm not a child of Holocaust survivors. I think perhaps my grandmother's mother, and maybe her aunt, died in a camp, perhaps Teresienstadt, but they were already estranged and it doesn't seem to have affected us much (is this right? did I make it up?). But our mythologies are of escape and upward mobility in the new world: from Washington Heights to the Ivy League.

I think of it, though, when I read about Otto Frank trying to get his family out of Holland.