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TWO

Two European Villages

In this dream, summer was all year round, our land a map of child-like colors But if you held this map up to the light, you could see other lines, not roads or streams, but tiny cracks suddenly opening under shaky towns

LEONARD NATHAN

Tab, the village of Bernat Rosner's birth and childhood, is located in the open countryside south of the Danube River and Lake Balaton, about 120 kilometers southwest of Budapest and 90 kilometers north of what is now Croatia. To the west, about 130 kilometers away, lies German-speaking Austria. The parameters of this rural world were broken by Germany's designs on Europe.

Despite the presence of a few radios in Tab, one of which belonged to a neighbor of the Rosners, the village was far removed from the outside world before World War II. News as we know it, broadcast first by radio and later by television, did not yet exist. To be sure, the people of Tab learned about Hitler's invasion of nearby Czechoslovakia in 1938 on the radio and in the local press. And Bernie remembers the occasion when half the village crowded around a neighbor's radio to listen to the announcer's jubilant description of Hungary's Regent Horthy, astride a white horse, as he led his troops into Kassa (Košice, in Czech), the capital of the province returned to Hungary after Hitler's dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. But such an exciting event receded into the background, drowned out by the predominant sounds of everyday village life with its domestic rituals. Like so many other European villages at that time, Tab was encircled by a wide geographic band of near-perfect silence, a silence that provided illusory protection from the catastrophe unfolding around it.

Only two villagers owned cars, the doctor and the count, who was the largest landowner in the area. But there were trains — two trains, to be exact—one in the morning from Siofok, the nearby lake resort, on its way to Kaposvar in the south and another in the afternoon that followed the same route in the opposite direction. These trains captivated the young Bernie's imagination as far back as he can remember. They gave him the sense of a horizon with wondrous things beyond it. As a small child, whenever he got lost his parents always found him at the train station. At home he loved to construct trains out of wooden blocks that were later chopped into kindling for the stove.

I believe that something more than curiosity made trains so central to Bernie's early life. His body and mind were always on the move, never at rest. Still true to the nickname, “Zizi kukac” (wiggly worm), he earned as a child, the perpetual motion that enlivens his memory is evident now as he gesticulates while telling his story.

But there is something else Bernie wants to communicate to me about trains and that railroad station, and he continues rapidly and with obvious urgency. During his early childhood, the station was a thrilling place where he could watch the trains depart to what he imagined were the distant and enchanting destinations that made up many of his daydreams. The Tab railroad station was also the starting point for the most exciting events of his childhood—the annual visits to his grandparents in Kiskunhalas. But in contrast to those early exciting adventures, at a later stage in his life the station came to connote something sinister, as when, shortly after the Nazi takeover of Hungary in spring 1944, he witnessed an elderly, bearded Orthodox Jew being beaten senseless there with the butt of a guard's rifle, for no other reason than that his distinct appearance annoyed the oppressor.

I wait for him to elaborate on what must be his most dreadful memories of this train station in Tab —the place, after all, from which he and his family were deported to Auschwitz. But he doesn't. More time had to pass before these particular memories emerged. Instead, he relates another nightmarish incident that occurred at a much later time in his life.

In 1971, when he was well established in his American life, Bernie, with his late wife, Betsy, revisited the village of his birth for the first time since he left it twenty-seven years before. After an emotionally wrenching daylong pilgrimage through Tab, they had come to wait on the station platform for the late afternoon train—the same train that played a major role in his youthful fantasies—that would take them back to Siofok and Budapest. A number of local inhabitants were also waiting at the station. Suddenly and without warning a grubby and obviously drunken old man approached Bernie and his wife and began a loud diatribe. Because of both the man's slurred speech and Bernie's by then poor grasp of Hungarian, he couldn't fully understand what the man was saying or the cause of the unprovoked outburst. He did, however, understand enough to realize that the harangue was filled with obscenities and anti-Semitic insults. The crowd waiting at the station immediately distanced itself from the ugly scene, leaving the two hapless foreigners to cope with the confrontation alone until the train arrived to take them away. For Bernie, it was a dreadful moment in which he recognized the same townspeople who had watched in silence as their Jewish neighbors were taken away so long ago. At the time, this episode also seemed to him still another variation on a theme —reminiscent of the same image in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina — in which the Tab railroad station served as a haunting landmark punctuating the turns and twists in his life.

Every year Bernie's mother took him and his younger brother, Alexander, born in 1934, to visit their maternal grandparents at Kiskunhalas. Although it was less than 200 kilometers, due to the many local stops and an hour's wait at Kaposvar before the transfer to their final destination, the train trip lasted from 7:00 A.M. to 5:30 P.M. Sometimes they took an alternate route via Budapest, the home of Bernie's aunt Rebecca, the sister closest to Bernie's mother in age and friendship, where they would spend a day or two before continuing. These visits to Kiskunhalas were the high points of Bernie's year.

Beyond the train rides, Bernie loved the time spent with his grandfather. But on each occasion he first had to get past his fierce maiden aunt, Libby, the dragon of the family, whom he compares to the Wicked Witch in the “Wizard of Oz.” Because the grandparents were elderly, Aunt Libby met the boys and their mother at the Kiskunhalas station. From the moment of their arrival, she monitored their behavior relentlessly and sternly corrected each transgression, no matter how minor. Bernie would say his prayers in Hebrew, and in one prayer— according to Aunt Libby—he mispronounced a word. However, this was the pronunciation he had learned from his mother, and he stuck to it whenever Aunt Libby was out of earshot. Not only his prayers but also his eating habits fell under her scrutiny. Knowing that Bernie hated sweet noodles, Aunt Libby made sure that he finished every bit of this dreaded concoction that was placed on his plate every Tuesday.

On one occasion, Bernie's spinster aunt even went so far as to turn Bernie into an unwilling accomplice in a scheme to postpone the marital bliss of one of his uncles. The day after his wedding, this uncle Schimi had brought his bride to Kiskunhalas to present her to Bernie's grandfather. Bernie usually slept in a particular cubbyhole near the pantry when he visited his grandfather's house. But on this occasion, Aunt Libby ordered him to sleep in the same bedroom with the newlyweds, frustrating any passionate hopes they might have harbored for the night.

Bernie's relationship to his grandfather, the assistant rabbi of Kiskunhalas, left a deep mark on him. The old gentleman lived a dignified existence in a world of books and reflection. Bernie remembers his grandfather's long flowing beard and the two to three hours devoted to the study of mathematics and the Talmud that he spent with him every morning during vacation. He idolized this learned mentor.

As Bernie recalls his early years of calm and tradition, he conjures up a sensual link to these fleeting weeks in his grandparents' house, with its scents of furniture polish and dried flower petals. Hoping that this elderly scholar had died a natural death before deportation, thus being spared the horrors of Auschwitz, I ask Bernie about his fate. But he does not know.

Religion determined the rhythm of daily life in the Rosner family. Tab had two synagogues, a large one for the moderately religious Jewish community and a small one for the few ultra-Orthodox. Bernie's family were members of the latter, and rituals were strictly observed. There was a prayer for everything, as Bernie recalls, one for eating and one for drinking, one before meals and one afterward, even one for full meals and one for snacks. At the age of three, Bernie's hair was shorn in Orthodox custom, and he began to learn the Hebrew alphabet. The letters of the alphabet were described by Hungarian words to serve as a bridge between the visual signs and the pronunciation of the letters. By the age of four, Bernie was able to read both Hungarian and Hebrew. When I ask him how he learned the German he still knows today, I am surprised at his answer. I had assumed he learned it in the concentration camps. In fact, German was the foreign language required in schools that he attended as a boy. Eager to read everything he could, he even tackled at an early age the German translation of Ibsen's dramas that his literate mother had purchased for their home. The family also owned a Yiddish translation of the Book of Leviticus. But Yiddish, a language for daily communication, was not used by the Rosners.

Each day began at 7:00 with a half hour of prayer at the synagogue. From 8:30 to noon Bernie attended the secular school that was run by the local Jewish community. He returned home for lunch but then went back to Hebrew school, or Heder, for religious instruction. These sessions began at 2:00.

The half-hour break at 4:00 Bernie remembers even now with a sigh, as if after all these years he still feels the need to pause for a brief respite before continuing. The midafternoon break was followed by more excruciating religious instruction that lasted from 4:30 to 6:30, five days a week. During these interminable two hours, Bernie rode his imagination out of the confines of the classroom to places beyond Tab, to Kaposvar and Kiskunhalas, and beyond the reach of the train journey he knew. And when the longing for escape became particularly intense, he imagined himself following the sun on its path to more distant places.

By 7:30 during the summer, everyone was back in the synagogue for the evening prayers before the appearance of the first star. In winter nightfall came earlier, and so did the evening prayers. In summer supper was eaten between school and the evening prayers; in winter it was eaten after the evening prayers. An hour of homework assigned by the teacher of the secular school finished the day's duties. The only free time during the busy week was on Friday afternoons. Even this interval was filled with chores left undone during the week or with preparations for the Sabbath, which commenced at sunset on Friday. Nevertheless, the absence of school on Friday afternoons and the relief that the drudgery of the week had been left behind lent those few hours a magical sense of exhilaration.

Bernie associates the beginning of this short period of respite with the Friday lunch that his mother prepared for the family: potatoes spiced with paprika and crispy fried chitterlings. Friday afternoons were also punctuated by the weekly bath and sunset attendance at the synagogue to celebrate the arrival of the Sabbath. At the end of prayers and after their return home, the Rosners' religious rituals continued with a blessing by Bernie's father and a sumptuous meal of fish and chicken and the traditional Sabbath eve soup prepared by his mother. This meal was followed by the recital and singing of traditional prayers. Young men from the Yeshiva —upper-level students whose homes were not in the area—were invited to the meal, to pray with the family, tell stories of their lives, and accompany the Rosners in song. These young men also joined the family for several other meals during the rest of the week and became part of the ritual life of Bernie's Orthodox family.

The Sabbath day started at 9 o'clock with an extended service at the synagogue that lasted until almost noon. On the way home from the synagogue the Rosner brothers stopped at the baker. There they picked up the casserole made of beans and a goose neck filled with a delicious spicy stuffing that their mother had prepared on Friday afternoon and that the baker had baked on Saturday morning in his large oven.

Saturday afternoon from 2:00 to 4:00 was examination time, when children were tested on what they had learned the preceding week. These examinations were conducted by learned men of the Orthodox community. Bernie's father was not a learned man and was chagrined that he was not qualified to examine his own sons. Following the Sabbath exam, the Rosners often took a walk up the “hill of a hundred stairs.” The stairs were made of railroad ties, and Bernie recalls that on one of these traditional walks the adults talked about how the Germans had just invaded Poland.

This austere schedule might suggest that Bernie's childhood was a time of unremitting tedium. But that is not the way he perceives it now. The little bits of free time—the Friday afternoons, the several half-day holidays at Passover and Succoth, and the visits to his grandparents —were, because of their scarcity, all the more enjoyable and precious. And an intelligent boy could infuse even the most disciplined days with his own imaginative escapes. On the 2-kilometer round-trip he made several times a day between his home and the village center where the school and the synagogue were located, he would run at full tilt and shout, “I'm the train on the way to Siofok.” On snowy winter days, a farmer would permit Bernie to ride to school on the runner of his horse-drawn sled, the only means of transportation during the Tab winters. These winters were enveloped by an aura of pristine innocence when he trudged home through the deserted, snow-covered streets with a candle enclosed in a glass lantern. At times he would take imaginary excursions to Andocs, the village where the Rosners' housemaid lived.

Bernie did not feel close to his father, Louis Rosner, who was born in 1892. But the son enjoyed the stories the father loved to tell and remembers that one of them was called “The King of Claws.” It had something to do with a cat, tiger, or lion, but the plot has faded in Bernie's memory. As Bernie and Alexander grew, their father became less involved with them and more absorbed in the changing fortunes of his business growing, processing, and wholesaling walnuts and other produce.

The Rosner ancestors had been wealthy. On walks through the village, Bernie's father would show his boys the property once owned by the family and drop hints about some disaster that had radically reduced the Rosner wealth and about the paternal grandfather who deserted his family to go to America. As young boys, Bernie and Alexander were told two different versions of the grandfather's fate —one that he was dead and the other that he ended up in San Francisco. The family was not poor at that time, however, and their fortunes improved during Bernie's childhood, so that in 1940, when Bernie was ten, they were able to move into a better house.

Louis Rosner, a redhead, had an emotional side that ill tolerated the impertinence of his eldest son. Their frequent quarrels were caused by a “lack of subordination,” as Bernie describes his own behavior, assuming a fatherly tone himself. At one point, Bernie's interest in learning and books got him into trouble. A prayer book belonging to one of the pillars of the community sat on the shelf right next to Bernie's customary seat in the synagogue, day in and day out. Bernie coveted that marvelous, leather-bound book so much that one day he stole it, took it home, tore out its pages, and deposited the cover, now devoid of its spiritual content, back in its customary place. Bernie was the prime suspect. When accused of the theft, he denied everything, prompting the owner of the book to comment sarcastically that perhaps an angel had taken it and removed its pages. The boy's insistence on his innocence gained him the nickname “Angel Tralala.” As the full wrath of his father was about to descend on Bernie's head, a minor religious miracle occurred. The owner of the book, the man who had dubbed him Angel Tralala, pleaded that the boy not be punished, since his transgression proved a genuine interest in reading and in matters spiritual. Thus the anger of the father was diffused, but the nickname stuck to Bernie for the remainder of his life in Tab.

Little Angel Tralala felt closer to his dark-haired mother. Bertha Rosner, née Schwartz in 1893, was the spiritual bridge to Bernie's grandfather in Kiskunhalas. She was a sensitive person who cried easily, and Bernie suspects that his mother was a hypochondriac with an imagined “bad heart.” She was the emotional font for him and his brother. An articulate storyteller, she was also the inspiration for his enduring love of books. He still remembers how beautiful her handwriting appeared in the letters she read aloud to him when he was very young. As he found out, these were the letters she had written to his father during their engagement. With a teaching credential, Bertha Rosner was the most educated member of the family. She was the one who made sure there were books in the home, even though the volumes often had batches of pages missing. Bernie remembers how frustrating it was to arrive at page 15, only to find pages 15 through 34 gone, so that he had to use his imagination to bridge the gap. Bernie's mother was also an expert seamstress and a good cook. She baked delicious sweets — cinnamon swirls, jellied rolls, and the kind of cakes that showed that Tab and its inhabitants were not far from Vienna and its elegant pastries.

Bertha Rosner instilled in her boys a sense of duty to take the straight and narrow path. This Hungarian mother employed old-fashioned educational methods in vogue all over Europe — unadorned scare tactics. When confronted with a disobedient son, she threatened him with the gypsies who roamed the landscape: “If you don't behave, we'll hand you over to the gypsies, who will take you away.”

How many times was that admonition used to reprimand European children, and in how many languages? I remember the gypsies in my village who knocked at our front door to beg. I hid behind my grandmother's skirts, fearing they might take me away whether I had misbehaved or not. The very gypsy wagons that moved in and out of villages struck fear into every child, since these wandering people played a sinister role in the pedagogical arsenal of European parents. In Bernie's mother's case, this disciplinary arsenal also included the Scherenschleifer—as he told me in German—the knife sharpener, who appeared periodically to sharpen the knives and scissors of the villagers. I remember that this same apparition, the quintessential outsider, wearing ragged clothes and a broad-brimmed hat, descended on my village as well.

The scarecrow of village life, par excellence, for both of us was the chimney sweep, with his black suit and small, hooked shovel slung over his shoulder. The broom and metal ball at the end of a thick, rolled-up wire cord became the emblem of this mysterious figure who would move in and out of houses to remove the soot, a service for which he was paid. I was convinced that my grandparents gave money to this dark specter to get him to stop damaging our chimney and go away.

But not all fears were induced by the outside world. Many came from within. When he lay in bed at night, Bernie was terrified of a nearby window that appeared brighter than the walls of the room. He thought that a corpse would enter through this dimly luminous square and seize him. I, in turn, felt the ominous presence of thieves, cutthroats, and night owls in the dense forest right next to the house of my favorite aunt in the Odenwald. During overnight stays, I dared not breathe too loudly for fear of attracting their attention.

The nucleus of Bernie's family—father, mother, and two brothers—was part of a large, extended family. Bernie's mother was one of twelve siblings, and his father had two brothers with sizable families of their own living in Tab. There was a paternal spinster aunt, who, in contrast to his maternal spinster aunt— the strict Aunt Libby of Kiskunhalas—was a gentle woman. Uncle Willy had a limp. He also had a daughter with artistic talent who helped Bernie with an assignment in his drawing class. Unlike his brother, Alexander, Bernie couldn't draw, so this cousin sketched a steam engine for him, and Bernie received a high mark for her efforts.

Uncle Joe, the troubled member of the family, had several children. His house was in constant disarray, and he frequently had to be bailed out financially. Bernie remembers that a family council was once convened to discuss the miserable state of affairs in Uncle Joes household. Nevertheless, one of Bernie's first adventures into the world of marketing involved one of Uncle Joe's sons, Jeno. Bernie was hired by this older cousin to serve as a distributor for his tiny candy business. Angel Tralala was unceremoniously fired from his job, however, when he ate the candy he was supposed to sell, or “consumed the inventory,” as he puts it today.

Despite his tightly scheduled days and the inescapable role assigned to him in the religious rituals of the Orthodox family, Bernie was keenly aware of the Hungarian world around him. Most of the non-Jewish villagers were poor sharecroppers who survived on a subsistence diet of homegrown food. Whatever cash they earned, these men spent on alcohol. On Sunday afternoons, Bernie recalls, their wives' and children's cries could be heard as they were beaten by the drunken, angry patriarchs. The black eyes and welts on women and children revealed the violence typical of these poor village men. In the street and stables, the animals —cows, horses, goats —became victims of physical abuse as well. And like any other village in Europe, Tab had its town drunk—Pista Krocsek. Unlike the fathers and husbands who were drunk only on Sundays, Pista Krocsek walked around in tatters in a continual daze. He became the inspiration for Bernie's first poem (which rhymes in his native Hungarian):

Pista Krocsek walks on the street,

Under his arm, he carries a big ax,

And what does he do with that ax?

He chops up little kids.

Tab also had some wealthy inhabitants. From the vantage point of his front porch, Bernie admired these “beautiful people” in white outfits who carried tennis rackets under their arms as they made their way to the local court. He yearned to be one of them, to join their relaxed ways of leisure and plenty. But there was a figure the eight-year-old Bernie admired even more than these tennis players —the second lieutenant of a Hungarian military detachment housed near Bernie's home. A well-groomed officer, in his tailored uniform he represented “the absolute epitome of grandeur,” as Bernie told me. It was the first time uniforms played a role in his life.

Jews who converted to Christianity were also among the upper stratum of village society, but interactions between the rest of the Jews and the Christian community surrounding them were generally hostile. Such antagonism had a history in Hungary that had affected Bernie's family long before his birth. His mother used to break down in tears when she told about the fate of a brother who was killed after World War I. Following the communist Bela Kuhn regime, counterrevolutionary “whites” took over and blamed the loss of World War I and the ensuing “Red Terror” on the Jews. During their “white reign of terror” they wanted to settle scores, and Bertha Schwartz's brother was on their list. They broke into his house and arrested him. When he asked, “Why am I arrested? What am I accused of?” they replied, “You're a Jew, and that's enough.” He was taken away and executed.

Although he was outgoing and communicative, Bernie had no Christian friends in Tab. For one thing, the strict Orthodox family rituals that structured his everyday life prevented friendships from developing. Even more important, the instilled hostility of the non-Jewish children created a barrier to friendly encounters. Gentile children often bullied and even threw rocks at Bernie and Alexander, targeted because of their Orthodox side locks, especially when they walked unaccompanied through the village. Bernie still remembers one particular tormentor and his frequent daydreams about beating him up. This bully grew up to volunteer for the Hungarian army, and Bernie recalls being pleased at the news that he had been killed in battle.

On March 15, 1944, the Hungarian National Holiday, a group of Jewish boys from his school who were carrying a Hungarian flag joined the parade through Tab. The other villagers taunted them as impostors with no right to participate and said that they were defiling the flag. They jeered and chased them away from the celebration. Bernie remembers it was usual for the hostile encounters with non-Jewish kids to deteriorate into fistfights and to end with the flight of the Jewish kids, who had not been raised to resort to violent actions or to fight back.

But the Jewish community had its own defense against such hostility. They would sing Yiddish songs for each other that were unintelligible to the Hungarian-speaking villagers. When I asked Bernie what kind of songs they were and whether he remembered any of them, he asked me to wait while he excused himself for a few minutes. When he reemerged from the downstairs of his home, he carried a tape recorded off a scratchy old record that contained some of these Yiddish songs. When he played one of them for me, I could catch no more than a few words at first. Bernie also had difficulty understanding the text of this melodious, seemingly plaintive song, sung in a minor key. Only after he replayed it did I realize that the message of the song was anything but plaintive. It told in a subtle, almost insinuating way about Christians who behaved violently and got drunk in taverns, in contrast to the Jews, who were pious and hardworking and attended synagogue regularly. We had a good laugh over this subversive piece of musical resistance that had been languishing for years in a bottom drawer. The only other contacts between Jews and Christians took place between poor Christian villagers and the Jewish households who employed them as servants. In Bernie's home, these Christian servants had the task, among other things, of switching the electricity on and off during the Sabbath so that the Rosners could live up to the Orthodox tradition of not working on the Holy Day.

All villagers, rich and poor, shared an everyday communal life that changed only with the seasons. In springtime the various fruit crops were harvested—cherries first, plums later, followed by apples and pears. Walnuts developed in their soft green outer shells until ripe for picking and peeling toward the end of summer. The threshing season started in August, first with the wheat and afterward, the rye. Sharecroppers would bring their loaded wagons to the threshing machine that ground on all day and into the night, separating the kernels from the chaff. Sacks were attached to one end of the machine, and by moving a lever, they were filled with the ripe grain. According to a certain rhythm and accompanied by an incredible racket, the tightly packed straw would emerge in neat bundles at the other end of the big machine.

During midsummer, a fair was held in Tab. Large tents were erected for this rural spectacle. Animals, crops, peasants, and merchants all shared this special time that obscured the general poverty. Bernie was forbidden to go to the fair but found the opportunity to sneak away nevertheless and watch the activities.

Early winter was the season for slaughtering pigs. From sunrise to sundown, the squeals of dying pigs were heard all over the village. Blood was collected from their neck arteries, and sausages were cooked in a huge pot at the end of the day.

In midwinter our footprints marked the snow as we carried lanterns to light the way home through the dark night. And in the morning, after a night of heavy snowfall, the village was transformed into an enchanted landscape. Timeless moments of the seasons, with no beginning and no end. These memories of the boy from Tab are also the memories of the boy from Kleinheubach.

But these times came to an end. They ended for Bernie in early spring 1944, when the seasonal rhythms were replaced by the shouts of Nazis. Those harsh new voices disrupted life as the Jews of Tab had known it, and in less than three months ordered their deportation and extermination at Auschwitz. There, or in other camps, most of the Jews of Tab were killed —Bernie's literate mother, who thought she had a bad heart, and severe Aunt Libby of Kiskunhalas, and Uncles Joe and Willy and their children, and Bernie's father, preoccupied with his work, and the nice spinster aunt of Tab, and Bernie's own little brother, Alexander, a talented drawer of horses, and, if he lived that long, the wise and learned grandfather of Kiskunhalas, and the devout Orthodox Jew from the next pew in the synagogue whose book Bernie stole, who pleaded with Bernie's father for leniency. And…and…and. There is no end to this list. The only survivor among family members, friends, and acquaintances was Angel Tralala.

Located southeast of Frankfurt in the Main Valley, the village of Kleinheubach was one of the few Protestant enclaves in an otherwise Catholic region of northern Bavaria. Many of the family names still have Huguenot origins: Dauphin, Zink, Willared. In the early 1930s, news in the modern sense, as in Tab, was still in the process of being invented. Few villagers had enough money to buy the newspapers that existed. And after Hitler's rise to power, the press was anything but free and objective. The village was roused out of its rural slumber when the wealthier families acquired a radio, or Volksempfanger, the so-called people's receiver. Promoted by the Nazis, it was sold at low cost so that villagers could begin to partake in the events of the wider world —operettas by Franz Lehar from Vienna, soccer matches from Rome and Amsterdam, Hitler's speeches from Berlin, and Nazi propaganda about Germany's noble past and the murderous designs of its enemies.

During Hitler s speeches, village activities almost came to a stop, as if by command of an invisible wand. Scurrying home through the deserted streets, one could hear the Fiihrer's staccato voice blasting out through open windows here and there or even through the walls of some houses. His voice seemed to be everywhere while families hovered around their radios listening to heroic stories of World War I and ominous assertions about outsiders ready to destroy the “German soul.” One place villagers might read about Nazi Party opinions was in Der Sturmer, a weekly that was posted publicly in a vitrine on a wall on Main Street. Everyone knew the reputation of its editor, Julius Streicher, the quintessential Nazi anti-Semite. Printed in Nuremberg, the paper was full of venomous propaganda against the Jews.

Hitler had come to power on January 30, 1933, and in the fall of that year my father moved my mother and me from San Francisco back to Kleinheubach. Though a German citizen, in California my father had worked as a professional violinist in Bay Area movie theater orchestras. But the depression was in progress and the talkies had made theater orchestras obsolete. I was three years old, and as my father once explained, he returned to Germany, not to become a Nazi, but to feed his wife and son. Other family stories told of how he was moved by letters he received in California from family and friends that extolled the bright future being shaped for all Germans ready to participate in the Nazi movement.

By the time we arrived in Germany, the Ermächtigungsgesetz (law of empowerment) had put the power of the German state into the hands of Adolf Hitler, all opposition parties had been forbidden, all unions had been disbanded, all non-Aryan bureaucrats had been fired, and Jewish professional activity had been severely curtailed. Moreover, the first concentration camps had been erected in Dachau and Oranienburg.

In that year, 1933, Kleinheubach had 48 Jewish citizens—23 men and 25 women—at least 4 of whom were sent to the Dachau concentration camp.¹ Three of them, Adolf Sichel, The-odor Weil, and Ernst Sichel, who was nicknamed “Judenernst,” were arested together in March and jailed. Without a trial or sentencing, they were sent to Dachau. Fritz Sichel was arrested and sent to Dachau in a separate action in May. He was released toward the end of 1935 and in 1937 was able to emigrate to America. Ernst Sichel was released after sixteen months and later emigrated to Argentina. Theodor Weil was imprisoned for six years before his release and emigration to the United States in 1939. Adolf Sichel was also released but never made it out of Germany; in 1942 he met his death in the concentration camp at Maydanek, Poland. As I grew up during the next nine years, until April 23, 1942, when the last 3 Jews were deported to extermination camps, 8 Jews died of natural causes and were buried in the Jewish cemetery, 16 moved elsewhere in Germany between 1935 and 1941, and 19 managed to emigrate to Palestine, the United States, Venezuela, and Argentina. The fates of 2 are not in the record.²

The year I turned five, the Nuremberg Laws forbade Christian-Jewish marriages and Jews lost their German citizenship. On our arrival in Kleinheubach, we moved in with my paternal grandparents and my father found his first job playing the piano in a hotel. Soon he landed a better job working for the Nazi Party. A Nazi who worked for the DAF (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, the worker's wing of the NSDAP, or National Socialist German Workers' Party) had learned of his musical talent and asked him to work in the KDF (Kraft durch Freude, or Power through Joy), a division of the DAF involved in organizing social events and vacations for workers to wean them from socialist leanings and bind them to the Nazi Party. My father was eager for a better job, and when this Nazi bureaucrat learned that my father was not a Nazi Party member because he had recently returned from America, he arranged to take him in retroactive to March 1933, a date that increased my father's seniority. Germans who had joined the Nazi Party before Hitler came to power enjoyed enhanced status as the “best,” most reliable Nazis. This elite of so-called Alte Kämpfer (old warriors) also generally enjoyed the greatest prestige within the party.

Whereas Orthodox Judaism structured the everyday life of Bernat Rosner's family, politics had a major impact on mine. The adults in our house were always in an uproar over faraway events, village rumors, and even opinions expressed within the narrow family circle. My family was politically split. Frequent verbal altercations were led by Uncle Ernst, a convinced communist, on one side, and by my father, on the other. My grandfather, a conservative who still had loyalties to the monarchy, insisted that the fights be kept zwischen den vier Wänden (within the four walls) —a frequently used phrase. Even someone as talkative as I was as a child quickly learned to Mund halten (keep quiet) when it came to political opinions outside the confines of our home.

One of my earliest memories of family life involved these heated arguments among rival brothers. If the subject wasn't politics, they competed over who could more quickly identify the composers of the music broadcast on our newly acquired radio. My youngest uncle, the quiet and retiring Ludwig, who usually shied away from the political fights, used to win these music contests. Although the political split in the family was severe, all the adults agreed with the Nazis about the “dark days” of unemployment and cultural decadence in Weimar Germany. I remember pamphlets in the house critical not only of the high crime rate of the Weimar Republic but also of its “degenerate” art. The Tubach family members were without exception anti-modernist defenders of classical art and music (hohe Kunst) and felt threatened by modern trends. I recall my grandfather Tubach's pun on the name of the composer Hindemith: “Hindemith, her damit, weg damit,” which meant roughly, “Hindemith, take him and throw him away.”

Regardless of the nature of the disputes or alliances that formed in the verbal trenches, my grandmother, who raised me after the death of my mother, kept everyone fed—primarily on my grandfather's meager World War I invalid's pension. During the depression that lasted into the mid-1930s, my uncles and my father added whatever else they could bring home from their various jobs to this steady, if small, source of income. As an employee of the Nazi Party, my father always had more money than the others.

I took it all in and was fascinated by the excitement that the outside world caused in our household. Because I was good at mimicking people, I was frequently asked to imitate Hitler or the Protestant parson of the village, Pfarrer Wagner, for the amusement of the assembled family members. I had a keen eye for personal mannerisms, and everyone in our house, monarchist, Nazi, or communist, would break up over my Hitlerian speech or my version of a pastoral sermon. But I was under strict orders never to reveal this skill outside our four walls. Once I broke the rule, causing my father great distress. On a visit to my father s sister, my aunt Gretel in Nuremberg, my father took me for a walk through the Reichsparteitagsgelände, the Nazi Party parade grounds, where he pointed out to me the concrete podium from which Hitler spoke during the rallies. It was too great a temptation for a small boy. I dashed up the steps and started my Hitler imitation. My father bounded up after me, yanked me away, and disappeared with me in the Sunday crowd that was strolling through the arena.

Many village men ran around in uniform, alternately angry or elated for reasons I could not understand, but their actions had an aura of importance. At one point, meek Uncle Ludwig had the opportunity to participate in the main Nazi Party rally held every year in Nuremberg, and I remember how he returned home glowing, transported by an enthusiasm quite uncharacteristic for his timid nature. The entire family joked about Ludwig's innerer Reichsparteitag (internal party rally), a phrase that gained widespread use during that period to designate any happy experience or emotion. Although my father worked for the party, he was disdainful of Ludwig's temporary transformation and ridiculed him for it. In fact, he had a keen eye for Nazi bathos and enjoyed making fun of it, from goose-stepping soldiers to Hitler's theatrical antics. My father once happened to meet Julius Streicher, the Nazi leader of the province of Franconia and editor of Der Sturmer, at a meeting in Nuremberg. At one point in the evening, Streicher spread a map of the moon out on a table and in all seriousness discussed its eventual colonization by Germany. My father found this hilarious and thought that his superior was crazy.

My father had lived a musician's life in the big open world of the 1920s and early 1930s in America and enjoyed telling everyone how considerate Americans were. He wanted to please his Nazi superiors for the sake of his own advancement, but he also liked to impress those around him with his savvy cosmopolitanism.

While the men tended to fluctuate in peculiar ways, my grandmother remained steady, always the same, always kind. My grandparents' house was the most stable element in my young life, as long as my grandmother was inside it. When she left the house for even a short trip, I felt lost and uncomfortable. To reassure myself, I would stare at the huge photograph of her as a beautiful young woman that hung in the living room. When I left the house, I loved to hear her voice ring out, calling me home for a snack. I knew I would get my favorite liverwurst sandwich if I begged. When I had a toothache, she would grind up some nutmeg to apply to the painful spot. One day during one of the endless, hot summers of my childhood, I saw her approach rapidly up an unpaved street that accentuated her stumbling gait. With her hand she shielded something from the sun, and when she approached, gave me the melting vanilla ice-cream cone she had carried home for me. If she had a personal fault, it was that she loved to buy fine clothes, to the consternation of my grandfather.

The few trips I took with her, proposed to me as an adventure, in actuality frightened me, especially because the first one turned into a mishap. On our way to her father's village near Wiirzburg—Königshofen, where he had been mayor—we took the wrong train and ended up in Walldürn, a well-known site for Catholic pilgrimages. After an hour of negotiation with the railway authorities, we were put onto one of the stifling pilgrimage trains, crowded with hundreds of people reciting Catholic prayers. I was forced to stand among the praying strangers, unable to move even as far as the WC at the end of the car, while outside a landscape moved by that was alien to me. Only after several transfers did we finally arrive, shaken and exhausted, in her native village. I much preferred her to stay home, and to stay home with her, where things were familiar and safe.

My grandparents' house was close to the railroad station, a marvelous and forbidden playground. Surrounded by shrubs, trees, and tall grasses, the station grounds provided ample hiding places from the station master, who would emerge from time to time to chase me and my small friends away. My grandfather had been a railroad engineer, and he told me stories of troop trains he conducted to Russia during World War I. A head-on collision with another train ended his career and left him nearly blind. One day he took me to see a locomotive that had stopped on one of the side tracks of the station. I was allowed onto the conductor's platform, where the engineer opened the heavy metal door to let me peek inside the roaring furnace in the belly of the engine.

The sound of steam engines starting off from the train station was as much a part of my everyday life as was the ticking and chiming of the grandfather clock in the living room, or the cackling of chickens in the backyard. In contrast to Tab, all kinds of trains stopped at Kleinheubach —not just passenger trains but also trains filled with Catholic pilgrims on their way to Kloster Engelberg, the monastery on the other side of the river, or trains organized by the Nazi Workers' Party for outings. Some of these latter trains were festooned with flags and swastikas and carried workers from the industrial regions of Germany to the Main Valley for a few days of parading, speeches, and relaxing in the countryside.

Music played an important role in our household. In 1900 my grandfather had founded a men's choir in the city of Mannheim. One of his brothers, my godfather and namesake, was a violinist who played his way from the resort town of Baden-Baden to the movie house orchestra of the Golden Gate Theater in San Francisco during the 1920s. It was he whom my father had followed to San Francisco, where they both played violin in the same orchestra, as well as in the Paramount Theater Orchestra in Oakland. My cousin Lore was a brilliant piano and harpsichord student at the conservatory in Nuremberg. I was pitted against her during one of our dreaded competitive family recitals. She played Chopin's “Minute Waltz” with ease, while I managed only a halting version of Mozart's “Rondo alla turca.” Enraged at my incompetence, my father told me that I had embarrassed both of us in front of the entire family. After that I came to detest piano practice even more than I had before.

Though he was usually absent, my father loomed large in my mind. He was not just another peasant villager huddled at the radio listening passively to the happenings of the outside world. Rather, he was an active participant in “important events,” organizing visits of workers to our rural region in his KDF capacity. He came home on weekends and tried to make up for his lack of paternal presence during the rest of the week by intensifying his surveillance of my progress in grade school. I usually fell far short of his expectations without ever really understanding what he wanted of me. There were so many things I did not understand, and no one, including my father, bothered to explain them to me. I couldn't understand, for example, why the letter q was not independent like the other letters and always had to be accompanied by a u. When I was told to sing zweite Stimme (second voice), I thought I was to somehow split my voice and sing two different tones at the same time. My teachers couldn't understand why a musician's son was so lacking in talent.

I remember once misspelling the German word for “little tree”—Bäumchen—three times, and my father began to rave that I would never amount to anything. Lessons with my father very often ended up in a beating. When I finally began to read a little, he arranged for my second-grade teacher, a friend of his, to give me a primer full of anti-Semitic stories. By the time I was seven I could read enough to see that all twelve verses —one for each month of the year—on our sentimental kitchen calendar began with the word “Deutschland.” When I asked my grandmother why none of the verses began with “England” or “Frankreich” or “Italien,” she replied, “Das kannst Du nicht verstehen” (You can't understand that). As I had already done in relation to music, now, in relation to my schoolwork, I withdrew into my own fantasy world where I could control what happened.

When I was nine years old, six years after my mother died, my father decided to remarry. He discovered that the respected village blacksmith, Heinrich Zink, had an unmarried daughter. When he married Maria Zink in 1939, the comfortable intimacy I had enjoyed with the kind grandmother who had raised me for six years came to an end.

For about nine months after the wedding and while my father had civilian work in the small village of Trennfurt downriver, the three of us lived together as a family—patriarch, wife, and son. I was very unhappy. My thirty-four-year-old stepmother and I developed a kind of statistical game in which we tallied the evenings my father spent with us at home versus the number of evenings he went out, not to return until long after we were both asleep. I remember our findings: for every ten evenings he was absent, he spent one with us at home. Although he was no longer a full-time employee of the Nazi Party, he remained friends with his Nazi cronies, some of whom I knew by name. They spent their evenings carousing in local taverns, well-known Nazi hangouts. I knew that my stepmother despised his friends, and because of his absenteeism, I began to grow disillusioned with him. Later, when I was older, my disillusionment came to encompass the political and moral spheres as well.

Despite the free time he granted himself carousing, my father must have decided that his life was too domestic, because he volunteered for the German army in 1940. Before he left, he arranged for my stepmother and me to move in with her family back in Kleinheubach. Then, except for an occasional appearance during his military furloughs, my father disappeared for the next seven years.

The move with my stepmother, whom I called “Mama,” to the small house of the village blacksmith changed my life. My stepgrandfather Zink arrived in Trennfurt to pick us up driving a wagon pulled by two cows. We loaded our belongings onto it, and the slow journey of about 8 kilometers up the valley to the blacksmith's house took the rest of the day. Once settled in my new home, the seasons of the year organized everyday life. I learned to work in the Zinks' fields, cutting and baling hay in the springtime, weeding potato fields, picking blueberries in the forest—a backbreaking chore —and harvesting rye and wheat in early summer. In the fall we picked apples and dug up potatoes with hoes. We used hoes for this task because my stepgrandfather believed that a cow-drawn plow would damage too many potatoes.

Despite the hard labor in the fields, all went well with my new extended family. I was completely accepted and well treated by the Zinks. My stepmother, much younger than my grandmother, was better able to continue the task of my upbringing. It is clear to me now that my father married Maria Zink so that she would raise me, but she never communicated to me any resentment because of it. Quite the opposite: she was loving and kind. Although I provided my new family with an additional farming hand, it was my stepmother more than anyone else who urged me to study hard in the Gymnasium (the equivalent of a college-preparatory high school) I entered in nearby Miltenberg, a few kilometers upriver.

More important to my upbringing than their interest in my education, this new family of mine was politically opposed to the Nazis. The Zinks' opposition to Hitler's regime was clear and at times openly communicated with family members and their closest friends, but never outside a carefully circumscribed circle. They loved to tell anti-Nazi jokes in their down-to-earth lower Franconian dialect. I remember one that my stepgrandfather told, one for which he could have been arrested:

Question: “Was hod der Hitler dem Mussolini g'sacht?” (What did Hitler say to Mussolini?)

Answer: “Wenn's schepp geit mit Pole, /duschd du widder mauern und isch widder mole.” (If things don't go our way in Poland, you can go back to masonry and I to painting.)

The Zink family had a long memory. Feuds with other families were never forgotten, but neither were the misdeeds committed against the Jews. I remember that when a particular Nazi thug returned from the war with his left arm amputated, my stepgrandfather maintained that it had been the very arm the thug had used to tear the sheets out of a ledger that listed his debts to a Jewish store. He had seen him do it from the other side of the street. The Zinks were righteous people who attended church on Sundays but did not pray during the rest of the week. I shared a room and a double bed with my step-grandfather. Every night after getting in bed next to me following his hard day's work in the blacksmith shop downstairs, rather than say a prayer, he uncorked a bottle of prune brandy, took a big swig, and started snoring almost immediately.

There was a maiden aunt in the Zink family who wore several petticoats. For some reason, known only to her and her brother, the blacksmith, they never spoke to each other. She was cloistered in a room apart from the rest of the house that no one was allowed to enter. Through her curtained window I could see the dried herbs, flowers, and fruits that hung from her ceiling and walls—preparations that were earmarked for use against every conceivable ailment that might befall family or friends. Aside from practicing her herbal arts, she wrote poetry and over the years produced more than a hundred pages of neatly handwritten poems that celebrated every feast in the family and village. At the end of each poem, she signed off with the words “Heil Hitler!”

To the irritation of her fastidious brother, this aunt had her own plot of land just outside the village that had the appearance of a jungle compared to the neatly plowed fields that surrounded it—the perfect place for children to play hide-and-seek. This Schlßtante— “Castle Aunt,” so called because she had worked for the Prince of Lowenstein, whose ancestral castle stood near the edge of the village—was beloved by every child in Kleinheubach. Her pockets were always filled with candy. I felt privileged to be part of the family of which Schloßtante was a member. She would take me on walks in the late evenings and teach me the names of the constellations, everything from the Big Dipper to the Pleiades. She had dialect names for some of these constellations, animal names such as hen, horse, or cow, that replaced the more erudite Greek terms. For her, the Milky Way was the road outlined in the sky by God so that the good people could find their way to heaven. I am sure she believed that everyone in Kleinheubach would get there, except for her brother. After the war, she took care to cut the “Heil Hitler!” inscriptions neatly off the bottom of her countless poems with a pair of scissors.

About the time my father left for the German army and my stepmother and I moved to her parents' house, I turned ten and was drafted into the boys' division of the Nazi youth movement, the Jungvolk. Precursor of the Hitler Jugend, or Hitler Youth, membership was required of all non-Jewish boys. Gentile girls had to join the Jungmädchen and then the BDM (Bund deutscher Mädchen). During my early teens, I developed an interest in singing, a skill encouraged by the Jungvolk. When I was thirteen and a half, I knew more German folk and marching songs than any of my peers and was rewarded for this accomplishment with the post of Singführer (song leader). On rare occasions when I still touched the piano, I played passages I liked very slowly and rushed through those I didn't. I tried to teach such fluctuating tempi along with the lyrics and melodies of the Nazi songs to the boys in the Jungvolk. But because we were supposed to march at a steady pace while singing these songs, my idiosyncratic “rubato” style was not welcome. As quickly as I had been promoted, I was disqualified and demoted to simple marcher.

My demotion was not due to my erratic tempi alone. My buddy Ludwig Bohn and I had such a bad attendance record in the Jungvolk that we were accused of undermining the morale of the entire group. Ordered to defend ourselves at the Hitler Youth headquarters at Miltenberg, we arrived in our everyday clothes and were immediately reprimanded for not wearing uniforms. When we were asked, “Do you place any value on your ranks?” Ludwig, completely intimidated, became flustered and answered, “We place no value on our ranks whatsoever!” When the group leaders angrily mistook his confused answer for impertinence, Ludwig quickly corrected himself to maintain the opposite: “We place enormous value on our ranks!” The budding Nazis in charge decided that we were too young to be punished, but they threatened to punish our parents instead and demanded the address of my father. They already knew Ludwig's father's address. I said, “My father is away fighting the war.” My insolent answer infuriated the bullies all over again, and they literally pushed us both out the door and down the long flight of stone steps. But this was the end of the matter. There were no repercussions for Ludwig or me or our families.

Once a week we had to show up for roll call, or Appell, as it was called, which was followed by Nazi indoctrination, marches, and paramilitary field games. Everybody did exactly the same thing—sang in rhythm, marched in rhythm, shouted in rhythm, and recited quasi-religious cant about the high points of Hitler's life. There was hardly time left for my usual fantasies. Just to insert a contrary element into these rigid routines — and for no deeper reason than that—I once took the tiny American flag my parents had brought back from the United States in 1933 and stuffed it behind my Nazi brown shirt, so that it was concealed there during the Jungvolk exercises. I had removed the flag from its small, gold-tipped, black wooden pole, and the silk material from which it was made felt soft to my skin. My tightly cinched belt prevented it from slipping down and out through my pant legs. I reveled in the feeling of difference this hidden object produced. I was well aware that I had been born in San Francisco, but somehow I knew that my secret game with the American flag was dangerous, perhaps not to me but to my family for owning it.

Nazi politics and the war also insinuated themselves into my schooling. My teachers at the Gymnasium in Miltenberg were either very good or very bad. Some of them had been transferred from major cities to this provincial outpost as punishment for reasons unknown to the students. I held one teacher, Professor Schwegler, in particular esteem. He had been a tutor in France, and he had a gentle way of looking at literature; it seemed to exist for him in a world quite apart from the one guided by the controlled hysteria in which we all lived. He was different, and that is why I revered him. After his only son was killed in the war, my entire class brought flowers to school. The dignified, frail old gentleman lowered his head and wept—an unbelievable sight in the hierarchical atmosphere of the Gymnasium.

Although he wore the same clothes year round and never washed or shaved, our chemistry instructor was another good teacher, passionately devoted to his subject and nothing else. He justified his appearance by claiming that God wanted him to look unkempt and he was not about to interfere with divine will. But for the most part, the Gymnasium seemed like a milder version of the Nazi youth meetings. Rigid performance was demanded; no real questions asked, no real answers given. I withdrew further into the world of my own fantasies and, as I grew older, into a world of books.