Inspired by: ‘My mother’s childhood
stories.’
Michal Reibenbach
camomile tea
The older I become the more my mind wonders back to my childhood. I
turn the pages back to when I was a young and insecure child. We lived in
Leipzig in Germany. My father was a businessman,
a furrier. We were quite wealthy and even
had a chauffeur. My mother was a spoilt lady of leisure; she spent her days
doing beautiful embroidery and playing the piano. I remember that I loved to
watch her as she sat dressed in one of her beautiful green or red velvet
dresses and played classical music.
To me as a child, the first
sign of the segregation on Jews came about when I wasn’t allowed into public
parks, and not allowed to sit on public benches. Later I also noticed that there
were all sorts of other restrictions: Jews weren’t
allowed to go to cinemas, theaters, restaurants (except for Jewish restaurants)
and the sign ‘Jews unwelcome’ was hung up in certain areas and businesses. Also,
we had frightening, threatening telephone calls in the night. My older sister
and I attended a Jewish school, during the breaks, we had to keep absolutely silent because ‘Jews make such a
lot of noise’.
A girlfriend of mine knew
someone who owned an allotment, which was a piece of land on which to grow
vegetables and fruit. Even though it was
forbidden for Jews to go onto allotments, this person kindly gave us permission
to play in it. One day after we had been playing
in the allotment my friend and I trotted off to a sweet shop to buy some
sweets. I bought a bag of Jelly Babies. As we were stepping out of the shop I was
accosted by a strange, rough looking little girl who said to me, “I saw you
playing in that allotment and I know you’re Jewish. If you don’t give me your
bag of sweets I’ll snitch on you to my Nazi father. I’ll tell him that I saw
you playing there, and he’ll come to kill your parents!”
I was only seven years old and I felt absolutely terrified. I
quickly shoved my bag of sweets into her hands, and I ran off home as fast as
my legs would carry me. Upon arriving home I didn’t have the courage to tell my
mother what had happened, I did, however, confide in my older sister. She was a
mere thirteen years old herself and also at a loss as to what we should do? For
ages, I lived in dread lest the Nazi’s come
to arrest my parents because of me. These restrictions
on our lives caused me to live in fear. Sometimes I’d wake up in the middle
of the night in a panic and I’d cry.
By the year 1938, my father
decided that it was high time that we leave Germany. In order to do so, we had to pretend that we are going on
holiday to Switzerland since that is the
only way that we can leave the country. One day my mother, sister and I packed
only a few suitcases so that we wouldn’t look suspicious, and leaving all our
worldly goods behind departed for Switzerland. It must have been very hard for
my mother. For the time being, only the
three of us set off, my father remained behind
since he wanted to persuade his three brothers to leave Germany with us. We boarded
a train to Switzerland and while we were traveling
through Germany our mother forbade us to speak German and she was very tense
the whole time, afraid less we would be arrested and sent back. When we crossed
the Swiss border she was greatly relieved and could relax at long last. Finally, we arrived at our destination and were
greeted by a small town, Ascona which was in the Italian part of Switzerland, on
the shore of Lake Maggiore, and
surrounded by gorgeous stunning views. There my mother registered us into a dingy hotel
which rented out studio apartments. Our apartment
consisted of one room in which the three of us slept, our beds cramped up together.
The sunny, golden weather enticed us to
explore the surrounding areas. Much to my delight, I remember seeing grapes
growing in vineyards for the first time in my life. Quite soon my mother was
able to register my sister and me into a German-speaking school which unlike
the school I’d attended in Germany I quite enjoyed. After school, she would
collect us and take us to the village square. There we’d sit at a café where
there was always a German daily newspaper which customers could read for free.
We girls would drink lemon juice while our mother drank coffee and read the newspaper.
It was the only way in which she could learn what was going on in Germany. Our
lives felt suspended and the days past by slowly. We
waited for three months for our father to join us. During that anxious period, it was distressing to see my mother constantly
weeping. Over time her continual crying caused abscesses to developed on the
rims of her eyes. She was petrified lest her husband for some reason wouldn’t
be able to join us and we would become destitute.
Close to Ascona was
a tall hill (350 meters high) by the name of Monte Verita or in translation
‘The Mountain of Truth’. It was a place where a number of intellectuals and Jewish
writers lived. On the weekends, my sister
and I would climb up the trail of the high hill. On either side of the trail, chestnut trees grew, the sunlight which filtered down upon us through the tree’s branches
and leaves and the fragrance of the woodland around us was magical to us little girls and for a while, we’d
completely forget that we were fugitives with an uncertain future. We’d
gathered arms full of chestnut and take them back to the apartment with us. One
day while climbing the mountain we discovered a tiny village nestling on the
side of the mountain.
Three months later and as always during
every afternoon, we were sitting in the café. The bright blue sky above had
only a sprinkle of barely moving clouds. As my mother was
searching through the newspaper her worst nightmare,
came true when she read that Germany had
closed its borders. This, of course, meant that her husband wouldn’t be able to
leave. She slammed the newspaper down hard on the table and cried out in
anguish, “Oh, no! What am I going to do?” She swiftly took us, girls, back to
the hotel and put us straight to bed forgetting to give us our usual evening
glass of milk and cheese biscuits. Her mind was in a torment, she didn’t know
how she’d manage.? “I complained and said, “Mummy I’m hungry.”
“Leave me
alone,” she answered pitifully.
In the middle of the night, our telephone extension from the hotel lobby rang. Upon
answering it our mother was ecstatic to
hear her husband’s voice. After replacing the telephone back into its cradle
she turned to us and said, “That was your father. He’s in Zurich and he’ll be
coming in the morning.” Then she plonked the whole box of cheese biscuits on my
bed and said, “Here eat them all.”
The
next day when our father turned up we came together for a big hug and we all cried
in happiness. He explained that he’d taken the last train out of Germany and
that for the last three months, he had
been doing his best to convince his brothers to leave Germany with him but to no avail. They felt sure that
nothing would happen to them, they were veterans of the last war, and in addition, they were married to gentiles. Sadly
they would be proven wrong in their assumptions
and were eventually exterminated in the concentration camps.
Our father stayed with us for a few days before setting off to England ahead of us in order to organize our visas and
also a place for us to live. He rented a
flat in Bayswater because there was a school nearby for German-speaking immigrants.
We traveled by train to Zurich from where
we would fly to England. In Zurich. while waiting for our flight, we stayed in
a hotel for a couple of days. As a treat, our mother bought us girls an ice
cream special with whipped cream and chocolate syrup. I couldn’t finish mine.
When my sister finished her own ice-cream she eagerly also gobbled down mine,
after which she was promptly sick.
A short while after arriving in England one day as we were eating a typical English meal in a restaurant. It consisted of roast beef, roast potatoes, Brussels sprouts, and gravy, (although
I wasn’t to keen on the roast beef for I’d never eaten it before). We heard a terrifying
broadcast on the BBC. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announced that Britain
was at war with Germany. It was 3 September 1939. Since our father wanted to get us out of the center
of London to a safer place, he rented a
small house with a garden in Mill Hill which was a suburb of London. Living in
England must have been difficult for my parents, but in Mill Hill I was
happy. I was free to go where ever I liked without restriction and I had my
family.
During the Blitz, we built an
air-raid shelter at the end of our garden to
which we would run every time the sirens went off. In the mornings on my way to
school, I’d collect pieces of shrapnel
often still warm from the night before. It was a wartime hobby with most of the kids. My father returned to his
former trade in London. When he set off for work
In the mornings my mother was always anxious
less she never sees him again. At daybreak, the sky over London was bright red from all fires the bombings had caused during the night. Because of his age, my father was exempt from the army, however, he volunteered as a Home Guard. The Home Guard ’s main job was to see that all the house’s
windows In his street were blackened out and also that everyone went down to the air raid shelter when the sirens screeched. My mother grew vegetables in the
garden and kept chickens so that we’d have fresh eggs to eat. She was stoic and
never once complained about how our standard of living had changed for the worse.
She was still a young woman but her hair
had turned completely white from all the stress.
I will forever be grateful to England for she saved our lives when
we fled from Nazi Germany.