1
Berlin, 1918
Leopold Keller was a chain smoker, and working in a cigarette factory for thirty years of his life certainly did not help. He was allowed to smoke as much as he liked on the job, and was given an additional five hundred cigarettes a month, which were meant for personal use. The cigarettes were all marked with an OB, meaning without band (there was a tax on cigarettes, and those without bands were not allowed for re-sale), but Anna still sold many of them to friends and family. One of her best clients was the headmaster at Elli’s school. It was a nice cash supplement for the family.
After the war had ended, Leopold lived only for his family, and would do everything he could to spend as much time with them as possible. He was barely making a living at the factory, and the family was quite poor, but he remained unambitious at work. As long as he could come home early and spend time with his children, he was happy. He once even declined a wedding invitation, just because his children were not allowed to attend.
For as little money as he made at the factory, nothing was missing in his children’s lives, and they had very happy childhoods. They had everything they needed: clothes, food, schooling. They just didn’t have any money to spare. Their clothes were mostly hand-me-downs from older cousins. Many of Anna’s relatives worked in the clothing industry, including Gerda’s uncle David Distel, who had married Anna’s younger sister Rose. Distel was a popular designer of women’s coats and suits in Berlin, and he always had leftover materials from his shop, which he would use to make the girls a new suit and coat every year. It was always beautiful material, and made to order. Gerda loved the clothing he made.
As for food, Leopold had been able to purchase a tiny weekend cottage in Heinersdorf, a farming community on the outskirts of Berlin, where they would grow their own fruits and vegetables. Leopold named the cottage Villa Gerda, as he had bought it shortly after his youngest daughter was born. The cottage was small, just a single bedroom, a living room, a small kitchen and a toilet, but the lot extended beyond the house with a garden and a dozen or so fruit trees, and they grew plenty of food. Anna made jams and canned fruits and vegetables, so she could serve them all year round. There was even a special kind of apple that grew on one of the trees that the children loved; they would wrap them in newspaper and store them outside in the winter. The colder the weather, the better the apples seemed to taste, and they lasted the whole winter long.
Anna was a good cook, a good housekeeper, but she was terrible with money. Every morning Leopold would give her whatever money she might need for the day, and tried to take care of the bills with what was left. With the cottage in Heinersdorf though, they were able to eat fresh fruits and vegetables all year long, and keep their children well fed.
On most weekends and during holidays, the family would stay out at the cottage. Erich and Gerda had to do chores to help out, including collecting manure from local horses to fertilize the land. Of course they hated that, but there was no pardon, they had to do it. Erich also learned to tend the gardens and take care of the fruit trees, and he became quite proficient at both. On Sundays, all their relatives would come out, and would gather for huge family meals around a long white picnic table outside. The relatives brought more food -- sausages, potato salad, plum cake -- and the children would go with a pail to a nearby farm for milk and even buttermilk, which Gerda loved. There was plenty to go around, and it was great to have so much family nearby.
Rose and David Distel had two children, Henry and Lucie, who were great friends with the Keller children. Gerda remembers going to the hospital to pick up Lucie when she was born, and she was so excited and happy to have a new cousin. From that moment on, Lucie was her favorite, and the two were very close. Later in life Henry and Lucie both worked at their father’s workshop, and became talented dress and coat designers themselves.
In addition to the Distels, all of Gerda’s aunts and uncles would bring their families around, and Gerda loved them all. Her aunt Sarah had married Israel Kleinmann, a towering bespectacled man who became good friends with Leopold, and they also had two children, Ida and Erich. Israel also didn’t work much, content to be with his family, but off and on he sold jewelry. Uncle Jacob married Aunt Dora, whose children Gertie and Jonny were also close with the Kellers. Uncle Harris married Aunt “Bertha,” and gave birth to Gerda’s cousin Sol Geduld. When Sol was still a young child, he fell out of bed trying to pick something up off the floor, and broke his arm so badly that his hand and arm was crippled for the rest of his life. But he was very kind to Gerda, and would help her tremendously later in life.
Bertha also had a sister, Sara, who Gerda remembers as one of the most beautiful women she ever met. “But she had no heart,” she recalls.
While at the cottage, the children also loved to swim. There was a lake nearby, the historic Bad Weisenssee, and Gerda’s favorite thing was to swim there. The lake was about forty minutes away, and their uncle David Distel would walk them over, along with his own children Henry and Lucie. They each had to pay five pfennig at the entrance, and they could pass through a bathhouse into the lake to swim. The men’s and women’s bathhouses were separated, but Gerda could swim out and meet her brother in the water. Erich was five years older, but the two were very close. Erich watched over her constantly. She was his little sister, and he watched everything she did.
For as little money as he made, Leopold also managed to have some of the newest electrical appliances that came out at the time. He had an electric heating pad, a space heater, a hair dryer, and one of the first radios on the market. It was called a Detektor radio, and the children would take turns trying to find a station, moving a needle along a little metal stone. Once they found a station, they had to remain absolutely still or they would lose it and have to find it again. But how exciting it was to hear the radio for the first time! Later, Leopold bought a bigger radio with several bulb-lit compartments, and they could find the stations just by turning the wheel instead of searching with the detector.
Leopold also had a large funneled record player, the famed His Master’s Voice model, with the icon of the little dog sticking his nose in the funnel. Every Sunday Israel Kleinmann would come over, and the two of them would sit around all day listening to records of the famed Italian singer Enrico Caruso. They adored Caruso. They would both be nodding their heads along with the music and smiling, smoking, listening. Israel was a large man and had trouble fitting into Leopold’s armchairs, so he always sat on the sofa. In the afternoons they would play a popular card game called Scat, similar to Bridge, all while listening to Caruso’s rich operatic voice.
Leopold had always been musical. He played the bugle in a military band during the war, but had also played the flute for years, and he even blew the shofar at a small Orthodox synagogue on Mulack Street, a place for Russian Jews. When he lost his fingers in the war, his biggest regret was that he could no longer play the bugle in the band or the flute when he returned home.
Leopold also loved the theater, and spent any extra money he had on shows for him and his children. “When I first saw Madame Butterfly, I cried my eyes out,” Gerda remembers.
Though he could barely afford it, Leopold even enrolled Erich and Gerda in private piano lessons of their own, though Gerda hated it. Erich had already studied the mandolin, and was five years older than his sister, so of course he learned much faster. When relatives came over, Leopold would make the children play the piano for them. Erich would play first, and play well, and everyone would applaud. Then Gerda would have to play, and she always found a tougher audience. This frustrated her so much that she soon lost interest in it, and stopped going to her classes. Her father tried to force her -- he even spanked her -- but Gerda refused to budge. Leopold was losing money for every class she missed, so eventually he simply gave up. Later in life, when Gerda made her own money, she went back to learning the piano, and felt terribly for how she had acted as a kid.
When Gerda was around six and a half years old, Leopold registered her into school. It was a Catholic school, because that was the only school nearby that would accept Jewish children, but it also happened to be the closest school to her house, The Kellers lived in a three-story apartment building at Berliner Street 4, only a few blocks down from the Garbáty factory, and her school was just on the other side of that. She really did love school, and learned quickly. During the other children’s religious hour, there was not quite enough time to go home, so she became friendly with the principal of the school. His name was Mr. Stankewitz (which translates as a combination of smell and joke), and of course all the children got a big laugh out of that. During her free hours Gerda would go into Mr. Stankewitz’s office and help him grade some of the other children’s homework. She learned a lot in the process, and was on top of everything in her classes, excelling in writing, spelling, and especially math.
“Mr. Stankewitz was a wonderful man,” Gerda would later say. They kept in touch even after school, and he and his wife even helped Gerda financially on occasion. He attended her wedding years later, but died of natural causes soon after.
“I am sure he would have helped us during the Hitler time.”
One evening, when Gerda was still in the Catholic school, Leopold came home from work and told his family that he had been fired. He never told the whole story, but he suspected that someone above him didn’t like him because he was the owner's nephew. And while he wasn’t happy about it, Leopold still had three young children to support, so he had to find a new job. Out of all the things he could have done, Leopold knew he wanted to be his own boss, so he could still have time with his family. After exploring his options, he decided to rent a stand in an open market, where he began to sell herring and pickles. “Can you believe it?” Gerda later recalled. “A herring and pickle salesman.”
Leopold stored all of the food at the weekend cottage in Heinersdorf, big barrels sloshing
with brine, and he would push a wagon loaded with three or four barrels of herring and a couple barrels of pickles, back and forth, every day, to and from the market in Pankow, about three kilometers each way. It was exhausting work, and he always came home tired. He was also upset at how little time he could spend with his children when the day was done.
To help support her father, Gerda brought some of her classmates from the Catholic school over to the market to buy pickles after class. She never told them it was her father’s stand, but soon a group of girls started buying pickles every day after school. It helped, but still the work was hard, and Leopold was unhappy.
One day on the way home from school, Gerda saw Josef Garbáty walking towards a park. Garbáty was still in charge of the cigarette factory, which before the war had expanded with an even newer building next to the old one, connected by an elevated walking bridge. He lived with his family in a large house on a wooded corner of the factory’s property, appropriately named Villa Garbáty, a white three-story brick mansion with arched doorways and dozens of framed windows, and he would often take his lunch breaks in a park nearby. Gerda saw him often on her way to and from school. Garbáty was now a white-haired man in his fifties, heavier, but with the same white mustache and goatee. Gerda would later liken his appearance to Colonel Sanders, or as she called him, “the Kentucky chicken guy.”
On this day, Gerda followed Garbáty into the park and sat down on a bench beside him. After reminding him who she was, she explained all that had happened with her father, and tried to convince him to give Leopold his job back. To her surprise, Garbáty hadn’t even known Leopold was fired, and was dismayed to hear about it. On her request, he promised to reinstate Leopold at the factory, and even promoted him to a senior technician position. Gerda was just a little girl, but she had made that happen, and her father was elated to be back at the cigarette factory. It was one of the proudest moments of her life.
2
Colorado, 2004
Today I walk into her room and she is sitting in a chair, her pants gathered around her ankles, her legs bare to the waist. Around her waist is a thick white diaper. An adult diaper. Her thighs are pale and crinkled, and she looks at me with a sense of anxiety and desolation I have rarely seen in her before. She stands.
“Help me get my pants up,” she tells me, and I immediately grab her waistband and help it over the diaper.
“I was at the toilet,” she says, “and the end of my scarf dipped into the toilet bowl. It got my pants wet too.” She is a beautiful and elegant woman, but at her age beauty and elegance can take a back seat to function: bathroom functions, or eating functions. Few people have ever attributed grace and elegance to nonagenarianism.
Still, she looks nice. Her hair is a silver-white, streaked with gray towards the tips. She has it pulled back into a ponytail, which falls neatly between her shoulder blades. She often wears bows, flowery, frilly, silk or cotton bows, and these she shows off with great pride, but today a simple pair of hair bands keeps the ponytail together. She adjusts it when we sit, reaching back with both hands and pulling the bands off, scooping her hair into a ponytail again and then slipping the bands back over the length. This maneuverability has always impressed me; she struggles with a majority of her daily movements, but her hair she ties with ease.
Around her chest she wears a long-sleeved cotton shirt, studded with the prints of colorful balloons. This is her favorite shirt, and she wears it often. It hangs loosely from her shoulders. Around her neck is another necklace -- colored metallic beads that match the colored balloons on her shirt. The necklace is long enough that she has it wrapped three times around her neck, and the beads large enough to appear heavy and burdensome on her frame. They are Mardis Gras beads, the kind they throw to young women for exposing their breasts, and the irony is hilarious. Behind the beads, hidden somewhere beneath the folds of her shirt, is her necklace with the Jewish star.
When she lies down in her bed, she covers herself in blankets, a hand-knit blue and white shawl over her shoulders, thick, warming layers of cloth. These days, she lies under these blankets more and more.
She wears her shoes in bed.
The mildest conversation sends her reeling into introspection, retrospection, commenting on the world gone by or articulating a story, summoning memories from the depths, and as she speaks I notice how furrowed her face has become, not from stress but simply age. She has soft, deep-set, light-brown eyes, though her left eye has been permanently damaged from two strokes. Her left iris droops slightly, like a crescent, and her pupil moves slowly, unfocused. The damage is not immediately noticeable, but once seen it is clear that her right eye is stronger.
Above her eyes, the skin creases in long lines across her forehead, and her wispy grey eyebrows are thin and expressive. More lines form circles around her eyes, further emphasizing her emotions: when she smiles, these lines crease up into bundles of rosy flesh, but when she cries the lines seem to pour down her face like teardrops. Sometimes, they bag in depression; at other times they are smooth.
Her nose is straight, and she has a strong, stout German face. From the two edges of her nose run deep, trench-like lines to the corners of her lips, forming an embedded plain between her nose and her mouth. The plain is smooth except for a thin cleft down the center. Outside of this plain, outside of the two lines, along her cheeks, the flesh is withered, dug out by years of conflicting expressions. Underneath her mouth the two lines continue, running downwards to frame her chin.
Her neck is loose, the skin flaccid and malleable.
Still, she seems stoic in her appearance, especially for her age. Few women in the home are as attentive as she appears to be.
Behind her white hair, at her temples, there are veins that bulge in muted blue. She points to one of them now, and motions for conversation.
“I fell the other day,” she says, “and hit my head here.” A fall like that could be devastating for a woman her age. Hips break with such frequency; what could a blow to the head do? “Come, feel here. I can’t tell if it’s a bump, or only a vein.”
I put my hand on her temple, and feel around the vein. Her skin is warm, and it does feel like there is a bump protruding from behind her hair.
“Does it hurt?” I ask, removing my hand just in case.
“No,” she smiles. “But I think there is a bump.”
Tough. Resilient. May she always be associated with these words.
She has always been tough, even when I was a child. I remember when I was about six or seven years old, I picked my nose ferociously. I knew that it was wrong. I even knew that it was disgusting, but when my nose itched or felt particularly blocked up, the most effective and efficient method of removing the blockage or of remedying the itch was, time and time again, to jam my finger as far up there as possible and rummage. Naturally, the next step was to look at the results, to observe the rummaged treasures of this mysterious orifice. One time, as my finger probed and prodded for loose and hardened pieces of snot, my grandmother approached me, lifted up her chin and pulled back the cartilaginous flesh of her nostril, exposing a deep and gaping hole. “If you run out,” she told me, “I think there are plenty more in here.” She held her nostril open for several moments.
It was a bold move, but the image she suddenly created of my finger picking her nose, anyone else’s nose other than my own, was so disgusting to me, so instinctively wrong to my childish sensibilities, that I found it no longer pleasurable to pick my own hollowed snout, and was able to abstain from doing so for several weeks.
It wasn’t a defining moment in our relationship, nor is it significant in fortifying her character, but I remember it vividly and, regardless of its unimportance, I will have the image of my childish finger prodding her flared nostril forever in my mind.
Though, I think it was quite possibly the first time I realized the woman’s strength, her toughness, to deal with a child so openly and not be squeamish about such a repugnant act. It takes quite a bit of chutzpah to offer a child your nose to pick, knowing that he might actually choose to pick it. It might not have been beyond me to pick it.
3
Berlin, 1927
In April of 1927, Gerda finished at the elementary school, and the time came for her to decide what she wanted to be. She wanted to be a dressmaker. That was her dream. So many of her relatives were already dressmakers or coatmakers or designers, and she felt she really had a talent for it. She thought of the clothes her uncle David Distel made for her, the designs that her cousins Henry and Lucie were already creating, and she wanted to be able to do that too.
Elli had studied to be a dressmaker at a specialized school for three years, but was also running errands and doing work for tips on the side, to help support the family. Without time to study, when the day came for Elli’s final examination, she failed. Leopold was so upset; he had spent all of that money for her training, and she couldn’t even graduate from the school. So when Gerda announced that she also wanted to be a dressmaker, her father erupted: “It’s enough that we have one girl fail at that school. You’re not going to become a dressmaker. You are going to learn to be a bookkeeper, and then you can work in the factory where I work.”
Gerda was so upset, her dream buried in her father’s stubbornness, but she had no choice in the matter. Leopold sent her to a private business school in Berlin, where she learned business and secretarial skills such as typing, shorthand, and general bookkeeping. The school was expensive, but it was important to both of them that she get an education, so Leopold spent what was necessary. Josef Garbáty even helped pay some of the tuition. The students at the business school studied every day from Monday to Saturday, from eight in the morning to one in the afternoon, for the full year. The work was hard, and there was a lot of homework, but Gerda came to enjoy it, and felt lucky to be there. Her father could barely afford the tuition, and many people at the time felt that girls didn’t need an education, that a girl would marry and the husband would have to support her. Many of her earlier classmates had already stopped studying, but Leopold knew that his daughter was a smart girl, and that she really loved learning.
Then, in the first weeks of school, Leopold became ill. He had never been well since coming back from the war. He couldn’t eat certain foods, and was always having troubles with his stomach. He had been to the hospital several times.
After some check-ups, it was determined that Leopold would need an operation on his colon. It was supposed to be a relatively routine operation, but on June 9, 1927, Leopold Keller, father of three, went in for his surgery and died right on the operating table. He was forty-six years old, and his death was a terrible shock for his family, especially his youngest daughter. Gerda was just fourteen.
Anna sent out invitations for Leopold’s funeral, black letters on cream-colored card stock with elegant black edging. Please join us to celebrate the life of beloved husband, father, uncle and brother-in-law, Leopold Keller. The funeral was held at eleven in the morning on June 12, 1927, in the Old Hall of Weisensee, with its brick arches and elaborate columns. For the funeral, Gerda’s uncle David Distel made her a beautiful black velvet dress to wear, custom-fitted, the most beautiful dress she had ever worn. Gerda was devastated, of course, but she was also so enamored with that dress that she was more concerned with showing it off than worried about the funeral. It was not until after the funeral that it all sunk in, and she cried bitterly whenever she thought of her father.
After Leopold’s death, Anna could no longer afford to make the payments for Gerda’s business school, and Gerda was told she would have to quit. She loved being in the school, and had made a lot of good friends there. She would miss them terribly. And just when she thought she was done, something amazing happened: there were some nice Jewish kids in the class -- Alfred Bach, Hanni Topf, Anna Lichtenstein -- and when Gerda mentioned she could no longer afford the school, they got together and somehow convinced their parents to pay a little more each month so that Gerda could stay in school. Josef Garbáty also continued to help out, and even Mr. Stankewitz chipped in what he could, and in the spring of her final year, Gerda was able to graduate from the business school.
It was 1928, and life for Germany's Jews was about to change.
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