Praise for the generous gift of life.”
-Jewish Prayer
1
Boulder, Colorado
2004
Clutching. Clutching, always clutching at her star, a silver star of David hanging from a thin chain around her pallid neck. The necklace was a gift -- from my mother -- more than twenty-five years ago. She clutches at it again, reaching into the folds of her shirt to extract the star and hold it in a wrinkled hand. Her hands are thick, calloused, their backs papery and mottled with age, their veins -- streams of blue in a sea of liver-spotted flesh -- pulsing as her grip tightens and her fingers twirl the star so that it glints in the light of her bedside window. A warm Colorado sunset silhouettes her heavy frame.
“These hands are from working,” she tells me, recounting hard years of labor, forced and unforced. “For twenty-five years I worked…” She trails off, as she has done more and more over the years, but I know the story well enough. I cannot stop watching her hands -- dry, flaky skin, cracked into long pale canyons, as rough as hands come, but to me they still feel soft to the touch.
She drops the star against her chest, but only seconds later grabs for it again, gathering it into her fingers and their grasp, cupping it into her palm. This clutching has become unconscious, automatic, a meditation or even a safety blanket of sorts, and I wonder when the last time she removed her necklace was. I can picture her passing, asleep in her bed, a final peaceful breath with the smooth silver star clutched tightly in her hands.
This time, like most times, she sits upright in her bed, a small metallic medical bed in her shared bedroom in an assisted living facility outside of Boulder, surrounded by nurses and caretakers and other old and ailing folks. On the walls of her room hang paintings and photographs, her small space overwhelmed with memories, and a giant clock with numbers large enough for her ailing eyes to read. She is nearly ninety-two years old, and her health is fading. She is dying. Undoubtedly. But she would like to share her story before she goes.
“Have I ever told you about my sister?” she asks, the thick throatiness of her German accent still prominent over an otherwise soft and lilting voice. She has, multiple times, but I let her continue.
“Elli was killed in an air raid during the war,” she begins. “She had escaped to the countryside with her children to avoid the bombings, but one day there was a particularly bad air raid in the area, and Elli’s children were nowhere to be found. She ran out to look for them, not knowing that at that very moment they were returning to the house, and a bomb fell right where she was. She was killed instantaneously. There was nothing left.”
There is little sadness left in her voice. The memories of her sister have hardened long ago, as have so many others, although some remain more raw. Occasionally she is caught by a heavier emotion, a memory forced from a deeper wound than normal, and it is then that I listen the closest, holding her hand and encouraging her to continue. It is mesmerizing and terrifying all at once, the voice of a dying woman struggling to pull the burdensome weight of memory off her chest.
“After the war,” she says through emerging tears, “when all the bombing had stopped, I went back to the Jewish cemetery in Berlin to see if I could find my father’s gravestone. I didn’t notice at first, but the ground there was completely bombed out, covered in deep, open holes. I almost fell into the first one. I probably could have been in there for weeks, and nobody would have known I was there. But I eventually found his gravestone. It had been blown into three separate pieces and scattered by the blasts, and it took me a long time searching for them. But I finally found all the pieces, and had the caretakers put the stone back together again.”
I have seen photos of that gravestone, covered in ivy in the thickness of the Jewish cemetery in Berlin-Weissensee, the name Leopold Keller etched into heavy granite. 1880-1926. I have seen photos of the man himself, mustachioed and military proud, photos with his young family, and alone in the years he was away at war. My grandmother was just two years old when her father went off to fight for his country, a German Jew proud to serve the Fatherland in the First World War. He sent photos from the front, and she sent photos back, growing and waiting for her father to come home, a toddler version of this ninety-two-year old woman before me. There are letters, diaries, even Leopold’s watch, dented from an exploded shell fragment that sheared off two of his fingers and narrowly missed his heart. And the story only grows from there. There are official documents from multiple governments, Swastika-stamped forms and ID cards, hand-drawn sketches and paintings, tapes full of recorded testimony, boxes and drawers bursting with assorted papers and scraps and notes, the collective life memory of five generations, passed on to the next and the next and the next. It is amazing how much has survived.
But here, for now, it is just her and me, this moment, this room, her labored breathing by the window, her trembling hands, the passing of another generation in 21st century America.
She asks me about school, about my own life, and I give her the same vague answers I give every week. School is good. Life is fine. I go to class every day, and spend a lot of my free time studying. I do not share with her the vices of my college life, or any other problems or concerns of the real world. She has had a hard enough life as it is.
“I used to love school,” she says, “though when I was a child the only school that accepted Jewish children was a Catholic school. Every day, when the other children had a religious hour and had to go to mass, I was free to do whatever I wanted. I usually went to the office and helped my teacher grade papers. I really learned a lot from that.”
She is looking for her star again, and this bothers me. It is hard to see her so dependent on an object, compulsively touching it, always needing to know it is there. I want to tell her that her necklace won’t fall off, or at least that it hasn’t in the minutes since she last checked, but the manner in which she searches for it -- locating the chain on her neck and then following it down until she touches the pointed star, feeling around to make sure all six silver points are there -- the way she does this prevents me from saying anything. If it is her star that keeps her alive, then let her have that comfort. Let her search forever.
I do love the stories, and find myself prying deeper into her history, asking questions that might stir up something new and yet must disturb her at her age and in her physical state. I know that, even after fifty years of living in relative safety and reasonable comfort, she is still very much affected by her years in Germany. To be Jewish inside Nazi Germany -- to raise a family in hiding during one of the most devastating eras in history, and still face what she faced even after the war -- the memories do not fade easily away.
And yet, despite my interest and my love, I know I don’t call or visit as often as I should. I feign being busier than I am, avoiding that old folks’ home and its hospital smells, not out of any kind of malevolence but simply because I can. Because she lets me. She is so grateful each and every time I am there, and shows an astounding amount of understanding whenever I make an excuse. Still, I feel terrible, and my conscience often forces me to apologize for not coming more.
“Did I ever tell you about my mother and the Rabbi?” she asked once after one of these apologies. “My mother, once she was here in America, lived in a Jewish home and visited often with a Rabbi there. She once complained to the Rabbi that I, her only daughter, was always too busy to see her, and I only stayed for moments at a time when I did. It was true. I was very busy, and could not visit as often as I would have liked. But the Rabbi replied to her: ‘Why don’t you look at it this way: your daughter is so very busy, and yet still she finds time to be with you.’ It was smart what that Rabbi said.”
The story is reaffirming, but still I can see that she is lonely.
On occasion I try to get her to listen to the tapes, the ones she recorded so many years ago, but she doesn’t want to hear them. “Too many bad memories,” she says, smiling. “It is better to focus on the good ones.”
So she has left it to me to piece her history back together, to join the tapes with all of the photos, the photos with the letters, the letters with the diaries, the signed affidavits and stamped documents and all of the scraps. Stir in the many conversations we’ve had over the years, the various life wisdoms a grandmother bestows on her youngest grandson, and add what we know now of the time, the historical evidence, and these surviving pieces tell a wild, wonderful, heart-wrenching tale, one that spans two World Wars and six generations, filled with loves and losses, suicides and cigarette factories, hope and devastation, and more human heartbreak than most can bear. From a young German girl who wanted to be a seamstress to a terrified Jewish mother protecting her family from destruction; from a young Jewish boy miraculously raised in the Nazi capital to an enterprising young man in America. It is a story of family, of journals and of survival. It is a story of the American dream, and the America that dream has become.
It is a story worth telling, to say the least, but to tell it fully we cannot begin here, here in my dying grandmother’s room, here in an assisted living home in Colorado. We can’t even begin in 1945 with Leopold’s exploded gravestone, or 1914 when he first left his family to go off to war. No. We must begin before that, before the wars and the hiding, before the fear and destruction. We must begin even before Berlin. We begin, as we must, with Hyman Geduld.
2
Warsaw, Russian Empire
1888
Nobody now can say for sure why Hyman Geduld packed up his life and left Russia with his wife, Zella, and their five young children in tow. He was only thirty-two years old, and the journey to the United Kingdom could not have been easy. He was leaving behind his father, Issac Joseph Geduld, the doting man who had taught him his trade in the cigarette industry, and his beloved mother, Feiga, who had raised him in Warsaw’s historic Jewish community. Both of Hyman’s parents came from large families, and many of his cousins left Warsaw around the same time, so there are some theories as to why they all left.
It is possible, for one, that the young men did not want to be forced into military service. Fifteen years had passed since the Czar Alexander II had introduced universal military service in the Russian Empire, and the mandatory quota for Jewish draftees had risen steadily since.
It is also possible that Hyman and his cousins simply saw more opportunities abroad, and wanted better lives for themselves and their families. All of the cousins who left ended up in different places, but according to family lore, they all did well. One opened a restaurant in New York City, on 23rd Street, called the Covered Wagon Inn. One went to Chicago and worked for the successful meat company Armour. One went to the south of France and became a high-ranking military officer. He changed his name to Geduldt for effect. Another cousin was reported to have been a physician to a President in Washington, though nobody can verify this. Another became a director with the Hamburg-America ship line. “They all must have been smart, and probably even had some money to start.”
Hyman’s grandson, Sol Geduld, returned to Warsaw in 1924 and found one of the older cousins still alive. The man was ninety-six years old, and lived in a home with six women. He still wore a suit every single day, and was incredibly strong and healthy. “When he walked,” Sol remembered, “I had trouble keeping up with him. The man’s handshake nearly broke my bones.”
Of course it is also possible, and more than likely, that Hyman and his family had felt pressured out by the pogroms, the protests against Jews that had tormented communities in southeastern Russia for years. When the same Czar Alexander II was assassinated in the spring of 1881 (though the assassin was not Jewish, one of his co-conspirators was), a wave of pogroms overtook the Empire, forcing the emigration of more than 30,000 Russian Jews between 1881 and 1891. More than 10,000 of these ended up in America.
When Hyman and his family arrived by boat in Glasgow in 1888, they were asked if they would like to become British citizens. They answered yes, an official wrote down their names, they had to pay two shillings each at the landing, and they were allowed to pass on into the United Kingdom. The family soon made its way to London, where they would live on Goulston Street, in the historically Jewish Aldgate neighborhood, for the next eight years.
On September 9, 1896, Hyman Geduld and his family were sworn in as naturalized British citizens. Hyman signed the naturalization papers with long flourished letters, his cursive H and G swooping and diving deep beneath the lines, and below his own he wrote the anglicized names and ages of his six children: Sarah, the oldest, was nineteen at the time. Jacob was a year younger at eighteen, Harris was barely a man at sixteen, Rose was only eight, and the youngest, Joseph, had been born in London two years earlier. Hyman’s daughter Anna Geduld, called Annie on this paper and otherwise known by her Hebrew name Chaja (meaning Light), had been only three years old when her family made the brave journey from the Russian Empire to the United Kingdom. She was now a pretty, dark-haired girl of ten.
Of course, there are also only guesses as to why Hyman and his family, recently naturalized British citizens, would uproot themselves once again only a short time later, leaving their lives in London to resettle in the heart of Germany. Some say that Zella could no longer tolerate London’s wet climate, while others believe there was more of a language problem: the children had all picked up English, but Hyman and his wife still spoke only Russian, Polish and Yiddish, and with Yiddish it might have been easier to learn German. Though their British citizenship would come back as a blessing in later years, one way or another, Hyman and his family settled in Berlin at the beginning of the 20th century.
Hyman Geduld was a cigarette-maker, and he continued his trade once in Germany. He had a little room at the top of his house in Berlin-Mitte, and he would roll all of his cigarettes there. The children would help when they could, and he soon hired several neighborhood boys to help with the production. The cigarettes were all made by hand, the tobacco carefully rolled in a fine paper, sealed with a blotter, and then put into little boxes. They went by the brand name of Saba.
Cigarettes in Berlin at the time were only sold in specialty tobacco stores, so to drum up business Hyman sent several of his hired boys to the tobacco stores in the neighborhood, instructing them to ask for the Saba brand cigarette. A few days later, Hyman went into all of the same stores, offering his Saba cigarettes for sale, at a cheaper price than any of the competing brands. Of course, he started to sell quite a lot of them.
One of the largest cigarette manufacturers in Germany at the time was a man named Josef Garbáty, who produced a popular and similarly-named cigarette called Königin von Saba, or Queen of Saba. The trademarked name referred to the biblical Queen of Sheba, and the cigarette was marketed for its distinct “oriental flavor.” Early packets of the brand featured a painted portrait of a young Josef Garbáty, mustachioed with dark features, posing in his suit and tie under a golden banner set amidst a distinctly Middle Eastern background, camels roaming the desert, pyramids and minarets vaguely visible in the distance.
Josef Garbáty, like Hyman Geduld, was Jewish, and had also been an immigrant to Berlin, chased from the pogroms of the Belarussian city of Lida to a place with seemingly more opportunity. Like Geduld, Garbáty had started his cigarette business out of his home, selling tobacco products from a vendor’s tray in the 1870’s with help from his wife Rosa. By 1881 Josef Garbáty had been able to open a small factory on SchonhauserAllee in Berlin-Mitte, and he registered the Königin von Saba name in 1887, a year before Hyman had even left Warsaw. It was one of the first “brand name” cigarettes in Germany.
In those early days, the young Garbáty kept his hair in short oiled curls, the same onyx color as his mustache and neatly trimmed goatee, but by the beginning of the 20th century, when the two Saba cigarette makers would come to clash, the black of Garbáty’s hair and mustache had turned a wistful gray, as had the thin goatee beneath his lips.
In 1906, Garbáty opened a second, much larger cigarette factory on Hadlich Street in the Pankow district of Berlin. The new workplace was a monolithic five-story structure covered end to end in windows, a building that stretched nearly a square city block. Only a year after its opening, the Garbáty Cigarettenfabrik employed over 800 people in the Pankow area. Photos show rows upon rows of workers in giant sunlit rooms, cranking out Königin von Saba cigarettes, as well as Garbáty’s other popular brands, Karo and Kurmark. The employees in each room, dozens of mustachioed young men and young women with their hair tied up, sit at wooden tables under hanging lamps, each with a small working space and an unbroken sheet of cigarette paper stretched long across the table. Outside of the factory and throughout the city, cigarette posters advertising the Garbáty brand adorned walls and lampposts. Carts and trucks with the brand name traversed the city, and boxes of Königin von Saba cigarettes found their way into every tobacco shop in Berlin and throughout Germany. They were even popular in Asia and America, as well as with the Italian state government.
Meanwhile, Geduld’s cheaper Saba brand cigarettes also started to sell, and he too was able to open up a small storefront, expanding his business. It was not long before Josef Garbáty took notice, and decided to do something about it. He called Hyman Geduld into a meeting. Garbáty, one of the largest cigarette manufacturers in Germany, was accusing Geduld of stealing his cigarette brand.
Nothing now remains of the legal proceedings, but one can imagine the suit did not last long. Garbáty, with his business empire and financial backing, won handily, and Hyman Geduld was forced to pay a hefty fine. More importantly, he was forbidden from producing or selling any more cigarettes. Hyman was devastated. Cigarette making was his only source of income, and in many ways the only thing he had ever known. He simply could not take it. It began a downfall.
On September 9, 1909, Hyman Geduld committed suicide. He was laid to rest under a small gray headstone in the Jewish cemetery in Berlin-Weissensee, the largest Jewish cemetery in the city. His wife, Zella, would join him a few years later. There their graves still sit, covered in ivy, a single tree with trembling leaves growing out from between them to cover their resting place in perpetual shade.
May they rest in peace.
* * * *
Like her father, Anna Geduld had also found work in Berlin’s cigarette industry, beginning at the age of thirteen at the Josetti Company, then at the larger Manoli cigarette factory in 1904, but with the opening of the massive Berliner Street factory, she would end up working for Josef Garbáty himself. Despite any personal grievances, it was not horrible work. Garbáty was known as a pioneer for charitable working conditions, and the factory provided great benefits for employees, such as free meals from a cafeteria (known as the Kantine, the café even printed its own coins), a laundromat, a library, a company choir for entertainment, a newspaper, and even a sports club. Anna would bring home fifty marks a week as a worker there, and the Pankow area grew on the factory’s success.
It was most likely at the Garbáty cigarette factory that Anna Geduld, twenty years old at the time, met Leopold Keller, a twenty-six year old “technical employee,” who just happened to be Josef Garbáty’s nephew. Leopold’s mother, Sali Keller, was Hungarian, and his father had married her under the blessing of a rabbi in her native Hungary, but not by a judge. When Leopold was born on August 29, 1880, in Berlin, the German government refused to recognize their marriage, and so he was forced to take his mother’s last name. He was also given the Hebrew name of Leibel - meaning Lion.
Like Anna, Leopold had begun working in his uncle’s cigarette factory at a very young age, but like many proud young men, Jewish or otherwise, he had also applied for German military service. He was eager to serve, but as he awaited acceptance there were complications. A letter from February of 1900 states that, according to information from the local authorities, Leopold could not be drafted into German military service because he was still a Hungarian citizen, like his “unwed” mother.
Leopold couldn’t believe it. He had been born in Berlin, had lived in Berlin for his entire life, and he considered himself more than anything a German (even more so than a Jew). Leopold sent letters back and forth, ever more terse, until he was finally able to get a letter from the Hungarian government that released him from his Hungarian citizenship. On the first day of November, 1900, Leopold passed his health examination and was officially accepted into the German military.
He served, rather uneventfully, from the beginning of 1901 until 1903. A service photo from the time shows a young Leopold in his recruitment uniform, a full head of black hair slicked back and parted, his dark mustache turned upward with little curls on each end. He wore the suit proudly, his square shoulder pads displaying the mark of his regiment, with brass buttons running down a wool coat and wool trousers, white gloves and a buttoned cap held at his hands.
In September, 1903, Leopold was released from his military duties and returned to his family in Berlin, but the excitement did not last. Within a month, his mother went into the hospital with complications from breast cancer. On October 3, 1903, a letter arrived at the house informing Leopold’s father, under the name Garbatti, that his wife, ‘Rosali’ Keller, had died from the disease. He was supposed to pick up her belongings and make funeral arrangements.
Sali Keller was also buried in the cemetery in Berlin-Weissensee, where her grave has grown over with dry yellow grass.
By the time he met Anna Geduld in 1906, Leopold Keller was a recent widower, having married earlier in 1905. His first wife was five months pregnant when they had married, but she died in childbirth soon after, leaving Leopold all alone with the baby, a fair-haired and fair-skinned girl named Elli. It was a tremendous amount of responsibility, almost more than he could take on alone. And so, only a few months after meeting Anna Geduld in the factory, Leopold asked her to marry him. She said yes. The couple was married on March 30, 1906.
In their wedding photo, Leopold wore a black bowtie under a white high-collared shirt, his mustache thinned into their curls above round boyish cheeks, his hair neatly parted in waves down the center. Anna at his side looked radiant in a white lace dress clasped high on her neck, elevating a pretty, angular face, with high cheekbones and dark chestnut eyes, all set beneath dark brown hair tied into an elaborate bun. Leopold and Anna were now Mann und Frau.
* * * *
After their wedding, Anna proved to have great motherly instincts, raising Elli as her own and giving birth to a son, Erich, on November 14, 1907. Though only two years apart, Erich and Elli were very different. Elli had a shock of blonde hair that curled in waves over big blue eyes, but she also had a timid demeanor, often shying away from the camera. Erich had Anna’s darker features, with dark hair and coffee-colored eyes, and he was gregarious even from a young age, posing for photos with flair and a certain childish charm. Early shots taken at the J. Fuchs gallery in Berlin show the family of four, Erich gripping a metal hoop with a wooden stick (a popular child’s game at the time), while his sister stands surprisingly cheery on a bench beside him, her left hand resting playfully on Anna’s shoulder, her right hand barely holding a large red apple. Two white bows try to keep her curly blonde hair in place.
Leopold stands proudly over his two children, dressed in one of his best suits (a striped grey three-piece) with a white tie tucked neatly into the vest, a silver chain draped along his ribs, his lucky pocket-watch tucked inside his jacket. Leopold now kept his mustache tight above the lip, no longer curled. His hairline had begun to recede, so he kept it shaved along the sides and closely cropped up top, but his face was still round and boyish beneath it.
Anna sits on the bench by their side, an open book resting on her lap. She wears leather boots, a dark skirt, a metal bracelet and a choker necklace above a black blouse, and her hair is tied up with pins. Her face is still young, her eyes dark but joyful, her posture poised and proper against the wooden back of the bench. Though the air of the photo is formal, reserved, the foursome staring unsmiling at the camera, the young family still seems happy, calm, complete. But they were not yet complete.
On October 31, 1912, with the help of a midwife in their apartment in Berlin, only blocks from the Garbáty cigarette factory where they both worked, Leopold and Anna brought one more child into this world. On that day, my grandmother Gerda was born.
3
Boulder, Colorado
2004
In the entrance hall of the home is a newspaper, A Daily Camera, a reminder that even now the times are tough and we are at war. The headlines read of insurgencies in Iraq, more troops to Afghanistan, failed peace accords between Israel and Palestine. The world is still adjusting to post-9/11 norms, and the elections of 2004 are only a few months away. Everybody seems to have an opinion, and accordingly, not everyone can be right. I rifle through the Sports section, and enter the elevator alone.
She is waiting for me when I arrive at her floor, seated on her fold-down walker, her eyes already fixed on the elevator doors. She smiles, stands with effort, and straightens her back (as I bend) to give my stubbled cheek a kiss. She has gotten shorter over the years, and I have only been getting taller.
“You’re a good boy,” she jokes, rubbing the back of her hand against my face. “But you need to shave more often.”
“Even if I brought you chocolate?” I ask, handing her the silver-wrapped bar. Her eyes open wide, a dry tongue darting out to lick an arroyoed lip. She takes the bar, drops it into the basket of her walker, and grins. We bring her chocolate not only because she likes it, but because she is a picky eater, and at her age she can use all the calories she can get.
“So how do you feel today, Oma?”
“I feel the same, Andrew. I am tired, and I still get dizzy. I would like to get out of this place.”
This place is the assisted living ward of an elderly home outside of Boulder, only five minutes from my parents’ home, where for the last four months she has shared a bedroom with a mousy woman in her late eighties named Jane. Jane talks to herself during the day and makes gurgling noises at night, and I cannot blame my grandmother for wanting to leave. I’ve always been tempted to whisk her away, just carry her down that elevator and out into the world, but it is too daunting a task for her body to bear. She can barely make it to the elevator. Instead, we revert to her room, and my father, who was parking the car, enters only a few moments later. She is already lying on her bed.
“Do you feel weak?” my dad asks, idling at her bedside.
“Why?” She smiles, and raises a mocking fist aimed at her son. “Do you want to fight me?” She laughs at her joke, and he can’t help but laugh too.
It is amazing that for everything and everyone she has lost, she never lost her sense of humor.
She sits upright in her bed again, and during lulls she counts the varying objects in her room and on her walls. Counting, always counting. She counts the six corners of her star, the framed pictures and paintings on her walls, the beaded necklaces she keeps in a pink plastic tub beside her bed. Slowly, deliberately, she counts: One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. She rarely gets above six.
The counting, like the clutching, has become automatic, a mantra for a slowing mind, an exercise for her brain, a recognition of the same pictures and star points and beads, day after day after day. I count along with her. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
Among the pictures that she counts are paintings done by my grandfather, before he passed in 1962. The largest is my favorite, a turquoise river scene in which two native women, their hair black and braided, their skin dark from hours in the sun, wash clothes along the river, piling shirts in wide woven baskets on the rocks.
There is also a framed black and white photo of both my grandparents, circa 1953, years after the war ended but only a few weeks before my grandfather was arrested, this time by the Communists in East Germany. They are elegantly garbed for a wedding, he in a black tuxedo and she in a cream-colored silken dress. He stands behind with his hands wrapped around her waist, and she leans into him smiling, the same smile she often gives me when I walk into the room.
“This is my favorite photo,” she has told me. It reminds her not only of her husband, but of the better times in Germany, moments of that hard but beautiful life in between the terror and violence, a time of hope and even happiness.
She counts the photos again, numbering each one carefully and methodically, pointing an accusing finger at each as she sounds out its number. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. There is a certain satisfaction every time she reaches six, a completion of the cycle of objects she has confirmed are still there. The satisfaction lasts a moment, before she starts counting again from the first.
“You like the number six?” I ask out of curiosity. She clutches at her star, touching each of its six points, looks at the clock, and answers:
“Yes. I suppose I do. Six is dinner time.”
As if on cue, a nurse peaks her head in the doorway.
“Gerda. Dinner is ready.”
This is my own unofficial cue to leave, as I rarely stay for dinner, avoiding the shoveling of mashed and pureed food into trembling mouths, the digestive grunts and groans of the home’s communal mealtime. Often I will walk her to the dining room, give her a quick kiss goodbye, and scurry off before the jealous stares of the other old ladies find me. Indeed, this is a lonely, lonely place, where few can do much with the time they have left, and those who can leave, do. I leave her here with the other abandoned souls, to sit and count and clutch and await another visit from her youngest grandson.
4
Berlin
1914
Gerda was just a few months shy of her second birthday when the First World War broke out and her father, now in his thirties, was once again called to fight for his country. Leopold was assigned to the 33rd Fusilier Regiment Graf Roon, an infantry unit in the First Corps of the German Imperial Army. The 33rd was stationed on the East Prussian front, operating out of the medieval city of Königsberg. Among their movements, Leopold and his unit were part of von Hindenburg’s famed counterattack in Tannenberg, leading to one of the most decisive German victories of the war. The 33rd Fusilier Regiment would later see action at both the First and Second Battles of the Masurian Lakes, and would remain in East Prussia for much of the remainder of the war.
Early in the fighting, Leopold was awarded the prestigious German Iron Cross Second Class, often given for individual bravery in battle. He prided himself on the medal, a decorative cross forged in blackened iron with silver trim, hung from a black and white striped ribbon on his uniform. He was a dedicated soldier through and through, and would have given his life for the Fatherland.
But as proud as he was to serve his country, Leopold missed his family terribly. Anna sent photos of herself and the children as often as she could. Erich was growing into a handsome and happy boy, charming beyond his years, with an athletic build and jubilant brown eyes. The girls had both grown, and had taken to wearing white bows in their hair. In one photo, Elli looks slightly more drab in a heavy black dress, while young Gerda sits with her little legs crossed on a table, dressed angelically and entirely in white: white dress, white leggings, white shoes, and a large white bow in her hair. From a chain around her neck she wears a diamond-shaped pendant, and her tiny hands grip a large wooden ball in her lap. How quickly she was growing, and how her eyes still gleamed with that childish innocence, despite the war around her.
Anna, however, seemed increasingly weary in every photo sent. With her husband off in the war, the burden of feeding the family had fallen largely on her shoulders, and life in Germany during the war was far from easy. She continued to put in long hours at the Garbáty cigarette factory to support her children and their education, on which she placed great emphasis. And though the photos betray her weariness, she could still find comfort in the fact that the war had not yet touched her children.
Leopold was not as lucky. Trench warfare was devastating for all involved, and within the first year of fighting, a fragment from a grenade explosion had ripped through his right hand, shearing off two of his fingers at the knuckle. Another fragment from that very same grenade also roared towards his chest, puncturing his clothing at his heart. Amazingly, as if out of a story, the shrapnel hit the stopwatch that Leopold kept at his breast, embedding itself into the engraved metal and shattering the glass. The watch almost certainly saved his life, but was stopped in the process. The time on the watch still reads 3:16.
Leopold survived the blast, and was sent to the Zeithain field hospital in the German province of Saxony, where his hand was put into bandages and set to heal. A photo from his first visit shows Leopold with about thirty other wounded soldiers (and several stern-looking nurses), most of them bandaged in one place or another, a majority of the men with trimmed mustaches, a few with beards, most dressed in hospital whites and all wearing their buttoned military caps. Leopold, his rounded face already gaunt from the war effort, holds his slinged and bandaged right hand at his breast, looking very straight and somber. No one in the photo is smiling.
Though he continued to fight for the remainder of the war, Leopold would return to the same hospital for a number of other ailments and injuries, and in each photo he sent home his face appeared thinner and thinner.
Finally, after four terribly long years, with two stubbed fingers, numerous medical problems, and a broken stopwatch, the war ended and Leopold was released from his service in the German Army. In December of 1918, he was allowed to rejoin his family in Berlin. His youngest daughter Gerda had just turned six years old.
