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| ISBN-13: | 9781909291263 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Hertfordshire Press |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 296 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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Shared Sorrows
A Gypsy Family Remembers the Holocaust
By Toby Sonneman
University of Hertfordshire Press
Copyright © 2002 Toby SonnemanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-909291-26-3
CHAPTER 1
A bit of sweetness
* * *
Rosa examines the piece of cake carefully, testing its weight and texture with the tines of her fork. The golden yeast dough, its edges rose-hued with fruit syrup; the lush red-purple flesh of the juicy plums; the crumbly sand-colored streusel topping. Satisfied with what she sees, she lifts a forkful of cake to her mouth and chews it thoughtfully.
"I like this Kuchen," she says to me. "This is a good one."
Rosa is over seventy but the deep lines and bumps of her face make her look ten years older. She has walnut-brown skin lined with wrinkles and gleaming mahogany eyes under thick black eyebrows. You can see that her dark grey hair was once black. She pulls it back tightly in a bun but curly pewter wisps of it escape, softening her expression. I notice her hands because she brings a cigarette to her mouth almost continually – her fingers are slender and agile, her fingernails manicured.
Rosa is a Gypsy, though she prefers to identify herself more specifically. "My people are the Sinti," she says, the Sinti being a subclass of the ethnic Gypsy population who settled in northern Europe in the early 1400s. Rosa was born in Austria but now lives in Germany, in a two-bedroom high-rise apartment on the outskirts of Munich with her six-year old grandson. A tiny woman, she seems both frail and tough at the same time. Frail when she is in the grasp of one of her periodic spasms of coughing and her small thin frame seems too delicate to withstand the onslaught. Tough when she is angry and she scowls, her arched eyebrows lowering, dark eyes flashing as she barks harsh commands to her daughter and grandson. Then her voice and expressions seem too large, too intimidating for such a slight person. But now, pleased by the Kuchen, she smiles sweetly and her two gold teeth glimmer beside the white ones, echoing the gold and pearls of her necklaces and the small gold rings on her ears.
I am gratified that she likes the cake, a Zwetschgenkuchen that I chose from a neighborhood pastry shop, a Konditorei. I'd considered the extravagant glazed and whipped cream confections in the display case but had finally settled on this plainer cake because I knew how special it was. Baked only in the autumn when the tiny purple-blue plums are ripe, Zwetschgenkuchen evokes the golden October of the countryside, the lingering of the year's last harvest. I know this cake because my grandmother brought the memory of it with her from the old country. From this country, Germany. From Before.
My Jewish grandmothers were able to bring few treasures with them from their homelands. One fled poverty, discrimination and the threat of pogroms in Russia; the other barely escaped ghettoization and the then-inconceivable horrors of the Holocaust in Germany. So the family heirlooms did not consist of antique furniture, silverware or crystal but instead took the form of recipes for special pastries, remembered by my grandmothers and brought to America.
My mother's mother, my Baba, the one who had come from Russia and spoke Yiddish more often than English, was famous for her Schneckenudeln – cinnamon rolls. The yeastrisen, raisin-filled buns were small and hearty; they were plain – lacking icing, nuts or glazes – but very good and I always associated them with my Baba who wore her grey hair wound into a bun the same snail shape as the sweet rolls.
For special occasions – Sabbath or holidays – Baba made strudel, rolling the fine dough into a huge rectangle on the dining room table. I loved to watch her slight form as she moved around the table, plying her rolling pin energetically, then stretching the dough with her hands until it was thin and even, then filling it with a succulent mixture of apples, sugar and raisins or jam.
My father's mother, the grandmother we called Oma, was also a wonderful pastry chef. She brought her renowned Mürbeteig pie crust with her from Germany – a dense but elegant pastry made with butter, flour, sugar, a beaten egg and a touch of brandy – and filled it with sweetened cherries, gooseberries, currants or apples in season. And she successfully transplanted 'S' cookies, a tender, rich butter cookie in the shape of the first letter of our last name. It was considered such an essential delicacy at all celebrations that we'd come to think of it as the family cookie.
And then there was Zwetschgenkuchen, a German yeast cake topped with slices of sweetened plums. My Oma used to make this cake, then my mother learned to make it for my father and finally I taught myself how to make this beautiful, aromatic pastry for my friends and family. Every autumn, I'd pick the ripened dusky blue Italian plums, layer the slices of blue-skinned yellow fruit in overlapping concentric layers on a circle of sweet yeast dough and bake until the fruit turned a rich, rosy, purple-gold.
As Rosa and I sit on the sofa savoring forkfuls of the Zwetschgenkuchen and drinking sweet creamy coffee from thin china cups, we reminisce about shared pastries. Stumbling between her broken English and my fragmentary German, we talk about the recipes that crossed the ocean, bringing sweet remembrances of the old country. Rosa takes my hand. "I will make an Apfelstrudel for you," she promises. "Morgen." Tomorrow.
She is true to her word. By the time I awake the next morning, she's already mixing the flour, oil, egg and water into a bowl.
"Have some coffee," she urges, gesturing to the pot on the stove. I sit at the kitchen table drinking coffee from a frail china cup, watching her as she gathers the dough into a ball and kneads it to baby-skin smooth elasticity. She rolls it out into a long rectangle across her kitchen table and then places her hands underneath, stretching the dough thinner and thinner, just as my grandmother did long ago.
Looking at Rosa's strong slender hands moving beneath the translucent sheet of dough, I find myself wishing that only this, this shared fragmentary memory of sweetness, had brought us together. But as I watch her roll the strudel dough expertly around the sliced apples and sprinkle the top with sugar, I can't help but look at the faded blue Auschwitz tattoo on her right forearm. Pale numbers, preceded by a 'Z' for Zigeuner, the German word for 'Gypsy' which derives from the Greek root meaning 'untouchable' and the German root for 'vagrant' or even 'criminal'. Rosa hates the word Z igeuner, the word that the Nazis seared into her skin to show that they considered her, and all her people, to be subhuman. That faded tattoo reminds her, every time, of the Nazi genocide that destroyed her entire original family.
And it is this that has brought me here, this kindred history of bitterness and pain that Rosa's people share with mine. That faded tattoo is a too-familiar shadow of the abyss; it stirs the ghosts. As a child, I stole secret glances at similar tattoos on the arms of my parents' friends, German and Austrian Jews who came to our home to visit, to schmooze over coffee and pastries. When did I first learn to connect images of unspeakable horror and humiliation with these brands forged on human skin? When did someone – my mother? – first explain the name? Behind a closed door, in a whisper choked by regret: "Auschwitz."
There. There in Auschwitz and in Chelmno, there in Belzec and in Treblinka, there in Sobibor and in Majdanek, there were other sorts of ovens, ovens that produced not sweet pastries but only bitter ashes. In the Gypsy language, Romanes, there is a saying: "Our ashes were mingled in the ovens." There had our peoples been inextricably bound.
CHAPTER 2A bitter root
* * *
I can't remember when I first became interested in Gypsies – it seems as if I was always drawn to them – but at first it was simply a romanticized fantasy that I did not connect to my own Jewish identity. Who were the Gypsies? What were they like? I read about them, discovered that many of them lived in the United States and, when I was eighteen, I approached some Gypsy fortune-tellers on Maxwell Street, the vibrant, tawdry street market of my hometown, Chicago. I kept returning to talk to the fortune-tellers and eventually they invited me in to their apartment over the storefront. Somehow they let me hang around – that time and the next and the next – and over the next couple of years, I became acquainted with the large extended family, visiting them from time to time, relishing the chance to be in such an exotic environment. The sprawling second-story apartment was decorated with brightly patterned curtains, drapes and bedspreads in the same fabrics as some of the women's long skirts. I'd sit with the women and children observing people coming and going, listening to animated discussions (about food, cars, clients, relatives) that alternated between English and Romanes, the Gypsy language. To justify my presence, I took photographs of the family and brought them prints; once, they invited me to Easter dinner in their home.
This 'contact' didn't really give me much insight or knowledge of the Gypsy language or culture but I was not easily discouraged. I studied anthropology in college, wrote letters to Jan Yoors, the Belgian author who had lived with the Gypsies as a child, and determined that I, too, would get to know some Gypsies. Propelled by my naiveté and a strong sense of adventure, I traveled alone through Europe for four months the summer I was twenty – and by late autumn I finally came to realize the foolish nature of my quest. I had eaten meals in the caravans of the Gypsy Travellers in England, had been ridiculed by a group of young Gypsy men in France and had gazed longingly at horse-drawn caravans of Gypsies on cobbled streets in Romania, but I hadn't gotten to know much about the Gypsies at all. I was too young, too ignorant – and on top of that, I was a single female, highly unlikely to be welcomed in their closed communities. Without a purpose or a contribution to make, I could no longer justify my interest in the Gypsies. Still, I hoped to return to that interest, someday – when I had something to give, some reason to be among them.
* * *
It was twenty years before I returned to the Gypsies and though this time I had a personal connection that justified my presence, I was also aware of its limitations. I needed to know I could not 'become a Gypsy' or even come to know them very well before I could return to them. I needed to understand my own identity before I could begin to examine theirs.
I was almost forty before I began to re-examine my own heritage and started to realize more fully the weight of my family's connections to the Holocaust. Not that I had been unaware; my father, after hiding with his family during Kristallnacht in November 1938, had escaped Nazi Germany in early 1939. I was born in America ten years later and grew up on my father's stories of his homeland's treachery, stories of the relatives who had been murdered by Nazis, stories of his own efforts to flee and to secure visas for his family. My mother was less talkative but I knew that her parents had left Russia to escape anti-Semitic pogroms and policies in the early 1900s; the families that they left behind fell victim to the Nazis. My parents sought out the few relatives we had and cherished them all because our extended family in Europe was nearly all destroyed.
Still, I thought of the Holocaust as a horror that did not touch my own life with the force and impact that it had on the lives of my parents and their generation. Looking back, I can't pinpoint when or how that changed for me, but I do remember that one spring, when I was reading a familiar passage from the Passover Haggadah – 'In every generation one must see oneself as having personally come forth from Egypt' – I was suddenly struck by its meaning.
Similarly, and in some mysterious way, I was coming to see my personal involvement in the Holocaust. I would look at my face in the mirror and imagine my relatives who had been killed, simply because they were Jewish. Did they look something like me? In the Jewish tradition, one names a child to remember dead relatives; my parents had named me for their mothers' two favorite sisters, both of whom died at the hands of the Nazis. To bear their names was an honor, I now realized, and also a responsibility – to remember not only their lives (of which I knew so little) but also their deaths. And so I began to ask my parents probing questions, trying to learn some details of my ancestors' experiences.
I began with my namesake, Toba. She was my maternal grandmother's favorite sister and she was murdered by the Nazis in Russia. Her sons had immigrated to France but were arrested there and taken to Auschwitz where they were killed. My mother met Toba's daughter, Genia, the only survivor of that family, in Kibbutz Negba in Israel many years ago and gave her the one remaining photograph of her mother. Genia has now died too, and when I pressed my mother for further details about her aunt's death, she said she didn't know any more. "My mother never dwelt on how the family died and probably didn't know exact details," she said to me, reprimanding me gently for 'dwelling' on tragedy. Except for those few relatives who emigrated before World War II, my grandmother's entire family in Russia was destroyed, as was the Russian family of my grandfather.
Many more of my father's family from Germany survived, simply because they had more warnings and more opportunity to leave. But nearly all of those who remained in Europe died. There was Else Sonnemann, my father's aunt, a doctor in Munich who used to take my father with her sometimes when she went on her hospital rounds, buying him an ice cream afterwards. According to the family stories, Else refused to work as a doctor for the Nazis. I thought of her when I read an account by Lucie Adelsberger, a Jewish doctor forced to work for the Nazis in Auschwitz. Perhaps if Else had agreed to serve, she too would have worked in the Gypsy camp in Auschwitz, bearing witness to disease and medical experiments that prisoner-doctors like Adelsberger were powerless to prevent. Else was deported to Lithuania in 1941, where she was shot and killed by the Einsatzkommando.
My paternal grandmother's brother, Moritz Hermann, was a farmer in the village of Freudental, Germany, living with his wife, Sidonie, and their son, Adolf; they were deported to Auschwitz where they were murdered. My paternal grandmother's favorite sister, Frieda, whose name I bear as my middle name, Friedl, was a divorcée who lived with my father's family in Mannheim and sold sewing machines. She was deported with other Mannheim Jews to the concentration camp in Gurs, France, in 1940. My father tried to save her, pleading with the State Department to help get her out but his request was refused. In 1942, she too was murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
* * *
Why dwell on the negative? my mother asked me. I couldn't quite explain; I just felt a burning need to know more. I began to read books about the Holocaust, especially Holocaust memoirs, almost obsessively immersing myself in the horrors of survivors' lives so I could know about those who did not survive.
At the same time, I began to read again about Gypsy history, and now I realized something I had known but had not fully absorbed before: for hundreds of years in Europe, the Gypsy people and my people were deeply connected by the tragic history of ethnic persecution. Both had been targets of Hitler's plan for racial purity; both had been victims of mass murder in the concentration camp and the gas chamber.
Yet there seemed so little public awareness of the Porajmos, the Gypsy Holocaust. And now, so many years later, there was another compelling reason to pay attention to history. An epidemic of racially motivated mob attacks against Gypsies had broken out across Europe, from Germany to Romania. Gypsies in Europe were scapegoats, targeted by skinheads and ordinary citizens alike. Shocked by the horribly familiar connotations of these attacks, I wrote to Dr. Ian Hancock, a Romani (Gypsy) rights activist and professor of linguistics at the University of Texas in Austin. Was there anything I could do to help the Romani cause? I asked. He encouraged me to phone and write to Gypsies and Jews around the country, to see whether we could find enough support for a coalition organization.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Shared Sorrows by Toby Sonneman. Copyright © 2002 Toby Sonneman. Excerpted by permission of University of Hertfordshire Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Map, Family tree,Prologue – In Human Terms,
Chronology of Two Families,
1 A bit of sweetness,
2 A bitter root,
3 The family album,
4 Before and after,
5 I can do nothing for you,
6 The sky was grey,
7 Stains on the table,
8 I no like the German people,
9 I never was a child,
10 Inconsistencies,
11 A matter of surviving,
12 Then I realized ...,
13 I cannot talk,
14 Mano, the boy who was lost,
15 Spiritually broken,
16 A piece of bread,
17 In the rain one sees no tears,
18 Their ways and our ways,
19 Homeland,
20 Primitive people,
21 The question of complicity,
22 Run and run,
23 No trust nobody no more,
24 Nobody comes back from my people,
25 Thorns in the garden,
26 Friedhof/Judenfriedhof,
Epilogue – A spool of thread,
Acknowledgments,
End notes,
Bibliography,
Index,
What People are Saying About This
"This book is novel and solid. It should be widely read by students and by . . . people with general interests." (Benno Muller-Hill, University of Cologne)