Survival in Paradise

Chapter 1. 1942 Standing on the deck of the ship Nyassa, on its way from Lisbon in Portugal to Suriname, my mother started crying and could not stop. Why does she cry now, I wondered, now that it’s all over and we’re safe? The other refugees were all out on deck. We knew some of them from the waiting rooms of Dutch consular offices in Lisbon. One family we met in our hotel in Nice. Others had found their way to this refuge from the far corners of Europe. They surrounded us, some of them waving to people they knew on the wharf. The ship inched away from shore. My father stared unseeing at the waving crowd. My brother stood next to him and looked up to see how tall the ship was. My mother blew her nose and sobbed. I didn’t want to look at her. I ran to the other side of the ship and saw a limitless ocean. I was glad to be away from the crying and happy to scan the future. We had been on the run for almost a year. And everywhere we went, the Nazis threatened. We fled Holland in February 1942, a year and a half after the Occupation of the Netherlands by the Germans. I was seven years old when we escaped from our pretty villa town of Bilthoven in the center of Holland, not old enough to understand fully what danger we were in. After this year, it became ever more real to me, though I continued to hope for a while that I could resume the happy life so abruptly interrupted. The scene leaving Lisbon is as sharp and clear in my mind today as it was when I was almost eight — on that December day in 1942 when we sailed away from Portugal on the Nyassa, headed for a distant place called Suriname. Other memories of our flight from Nazi occupation are like scenes from a rushing train — blurred and hazy. And then there are those indelible, slow-motion memories — half recollection, half reconstruction, powerfully with me during the years of childhood and adolescence in Suriname and Curaçao, and continuing into my American life. Still other memories — such as my family’s years before Holland in Nazi Germany — are vivid. But I was really too young to remember. They seem compelling now because I heard them retold so many times within my family. All these memories live within me, in a kind of perpetual present tense; they cast their shadow over our new life in Curaçao, much as I tried to evade them, and are still powerfully present in my life today, where I know them to be inescapable. My father emigrated from Poland to Germany in 1922, when he was seventeen. He settled in the Saxon town of Chemnitz; he liked the small, busy city, gray but clean. Like many other Jews in that town, he prospered. A few years later he met and married my mother. Her parents also came from Poland but lived in Holland for a long time before settling in Chemnitz. My parents loved Germany, the country of their new prosperity, but neither of them gained German citizenship. My brother and I were born in Germany, Siegfried in 1932 and I in 1935. Our names reflect my parents’ warm feeling toward Germany, feelings later shattered by the Nazis. Neither my father nor my mother ever wanted to leave Chemnitz. In 1937, when I was two years old, my father had a large textile factory and a devoted German staff. “Fraulein Weiner,” he later said, “cried when we left for Holland. She was actually one of the few who knew that we planned to go.” Both my parents referred to her for many years, the ever-attentive, kind secretary in the business. My mother was warned to leave Germany by the Nazi parents of her German high school friend. In our flat in Chemnitz, I remember brown suitcases stacked up against white furniture. My mother and a driver took us in the middle of the night on the autobahn from Chemnitz to Leipzig. I dimly knew that my father would join us in Holland later. On a damp, star-stunned night, the car came to an abrupt halt, and my mother got out and ran to the side of the road and heaved violently. A few months later I was sitting with both my parents on a large chair in my maternal grandparents’ flat in Scheveningen, happily learning Dutch. Scheveningen has a boardwalk and a splendid beach, where my mother, my brother, and my little Belgian cousin Paulette, a mere infant, played in the sand. Here I tasted my first ice-cream. My most profound memory from those days is a happy, thrilled anticipation. I couldn’t wait for the next ice-cream cone, which I somehow knew would come soon. My first years in Holland are a blur. A large flat in The Hague. Walks in a park carpeted with flowers. A holiday near a windy Dutch lake. My father in a raincoat on a sailboat. Our move — for safety’s sake — inland to the central province of Utrecht. “Why do we move?” I asked, a question I was always asking, until years later we arrived in Curaçao and stayed. By then it was clear to me why we had always moved. The war started in 1940 with the German invasion. We were living in a small house in the town of Bilthoven. At around that time, I was overcome with longing for a bicycle, and I got it almost immediately. At six, I rode it in the park across the street, the Rembrandtplein. A more chronic longing was to go to school. My brother had started the year before, and my mother and I walked him there every morning to the large school building on a leafy street. That longing for school soon turned into a passion. One early morning we awoke to an aerial bombardment of a nearby military airport. Our windows were taped up with broad strips of brown tape. Every few minutes the house shuddered and shook. I was frightened, but no bombs fell on our street or even in our town. That day, my father received a letter. All morning he sat next to the heavy coal stove that stood in the middle of the living room while the distant explosions boomed. His thick black hair fell over his face, and he did not cover his eyes when he cried. For hours he sat and wailed, sometimes howling like a helpless animal. Once in a while, he stroked my hair forward and murmured, “Little sheep, little sheep.” The letter told of his father’s heart attack and death in the Urals, to which he had fled from Nazi-occupied Poland. The German invasion made it impossible for us to use the visas we held for Bolivia and Peru. Now all borders were sealed. The year before, my father wondered if we should go there. But maybe Holland would remain neutral — after all, it had in World War One. On the other hand, the Germans were threatening. We had to go. Perhaps we could stay closer by, go to England? How could we live in Bolivia? La Paz is at such a high altitude; people had been known to develop heart trouble there. And in Peru it had rained only once in six months! After the invasion, he, and even I, knew that those possibilities were gone. The persecution of the Jews in Germany made him get those visas, but since we were by then in Holland the danger still seemed remote. But now the Germans were here. My father started talking to himself, aloud. “How will we get out? No, I don’t want to go to Spain. There’s Franco, Hitler’s friend.” He looked at the maps, and I looked with him. “South America is where we should have gone. Maybe we still can.” We looked at the atlas for hours. “Anywhere but Europe. But how do we get out now? You know, I wish we had a tank.”