The Times of My Life: And My Life with the Times

Book by Frankel Max

Every time I marveled at the chain of absurd circumstance that plucked us from a town in Nazi Saxony mere moments before the Holocaust and eventually delivered us to the ark America, Mom would scoff, speak a word for God or Fate, and tell me to get on with life. She took pride, of course, in her "world-trotting journalist" and "editor of the Greatest Paper on Earth," but she had no patience for his sense of vainglorious melodrama. "Everybody who got out has got a story to tell," she would say dismissively, never realizing how much she stirred my desire to recount ours.

"Tyrannies We Have Known" was the title I imagined for volume 1, to cover our international adventures: one family's survival of both Hitler and Stalin and my lifelong fascination with the disease of totalitarianism. "Secrets I Have Known and Blown" seemed suitable for volume 2, to recount my newspaper  experiences and recall the scoops, leaks, and hemorrhages of Cold War journalism. To complete the tale, I dreamt of risking a philosophical treatise for volume 3, honoring the plaintive request to Mom from Berlin's commissioner of police in 1940 with the title "Will You Tell Them We're Not All Bad?"--a suitable epitaph for twentieth-century civilization.

My pretentious trilogy will not be written. As Mom tried to teach me, every life is a journey, a narrative in search of meaning. Nonetheless I dredged her memory over the years, and Pop's, and finally my own, for the simple reason that our predicaments conspired to make me a professional witness to the times of my life. A paid teller of stories, I judged my own as worth adding to the many I had already spun.

It is the story of a fugitive, beginning with a desperate pursuit of permits and passports to get our family past the borders of hate and barriers of indifference that defined our times. It describes a search for identity as well as safety, a yearning to belong but also to keep on running, to make a career of my rovings, my outsiderhood.

I escaped into America, and beyond it. The idea of America became my proud passport. A passion to conform made me a patriot. The discovery of words turned me into a skeptic. And the journalist's press pass sent me vaulting across borders to gain a spectacular perspective on our era. Like the astronauts floating in outer space, I've had a rare glimpse of the earth in my times, and it gave me an irrepressible urge to record the journey.

Refugee: 1930-1940

1--Where To?

I was not yet three years old when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, and I could have become a good little Nazi in his army. I loved the parades; I wept when other kids marched beneath our window without me. But I was ineligible for the Aryan race, the Master Race that Hitler wanted to purify of Jewish blood and other pollutants so that it could rule the world for "a thousand years."

Besides blood, what most defined a person in Hitler's Germany was a passport. But at my age I was ineligible for that as well and had to be inscribed in Mom's. Mutti, I called her, and she and everyone else called me Biba. Like many little boys in Germany, I was nicknamed Bubi but promptly mispronounced it to create the unique identity of Biba. We lived in Weissenfels, a well-scrubbed town in Saxony, near Leipzig, which manufactured shoes, staffed the Leuna chemical works, and served as a minor railroad hub for central Germany. My parents' passports were Polish, not German, although neither spoke Polish and had not lived in Poland since early childhood. Actually, they never lived in "Poland" at all; when Papa and Mutti were born, in 1902 and 1904, Poland had undergone one of its periodic dismemberments. Their native villages, proverbial shtetlach named Busk and Sokal, were dots on the map in a region called Galicia of what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The region became Polish again after World War I, in 1919; it became Soviet at the start of World War II, in 1939, then German, then Soviet, and finally Ukrainian at the end of the Cold War, in 1991. The Jews of Galicia could have amassed a colorful array of passports if only they had survived these permutations.

The Fränkels of Busk and the Katzes of Sokal migrated separately before World War I to the city of Gera in German Thuringia and took apartments in adjoining streets. They came in search of economic opportunity, which they found by buying and selling rags and cheap clothes, but they never lost the stigma of being Ostjuden, Eastern Jews. Even without the ethnic instruction of the Nazis, the German Jews looked down upon the scruffier ones from the East and not infrequently wondered aloud why they didn't go back where they came from. The Ostjuden looked too Jewish and talked too Jewish; they were embarrassing obstacles to the German Jews' "assimilation," which was an exercise more in hiding than in merging. The bent and bearded caricatures of Ostjuden that German Jews carried in their heads looked very much like the pictures the Nazis drew to portray all Jews everywhere.

Still, Papa and Mutti lived easily with these distinctions. They thought of themselves as born in Austria-Hungary and only perversely branded Polish; they felt like Jews and lived like Germans. The quest for their own business took them from Gera to Weissenfels shortly after I was born. The chemical workers promised to be good customers of my grandfather, a peddler, and his son, who dreamed of opening their own dry goods store. There were no major tensions between the 120 Jews and 40,000 Germans of Weissenfels. The Jews were prominent among the merchants, lawyers, and physicians; many of them had assimilated clear into mixed marriages. The fathers of our town's German Jews had fought for Kaiser Wilhelm II in World War I, and they would have fought for Germany again if allowed. We were the only Jews in town who did not possess German citizenship, and our political views were a smidgen less Germanic than those of the rest, but we were respected members of the Jewish congregation and accepted members of the larger society.

Mom often testified that until the Nazis came along anti-Semitism was something her parents talked about only in tales of the old country. In Weissenfels, she said, the most common distinction between Jew and Gentile arose in discussions of servants: people thought a German girl trained in a Jewish household was less desirable--she was "too spoiled."

Fränkel became a well-known name in Weissenfels on New Year's Day in 1933, when it appeared in large letters above the entrance of a store at one corner of the town's main marketplace. The store carried stockings and handkerchiefs, suits, dresses, and some shoes, and on special order it could provide tables, beds, and sofas, even an occasional icebox or piano. Opa Isaak Fränkel, my grandfather, and his energetic son, Jakob, acquired their goods in Leipzig or Berlin, added a modest profit, and delivered wherever you wished. And if the buttons on your suit had to be moved or a dress needed shortening, Jakob's wife, Mary, was at hand a few hours each day with pins in her mouth to make the garment fit. The appeal of the Fränkels lay not only in their cheerful one-stop service but in their apparently trusting nature: they let even 1,000-mark items out of the store with only a small down payment, and, after months of weekly collections, when you were close to settling the debt, they would urge you to take home some other goods with "nothing down." As in his prior peddling enterprise, Pop kept bundles of neat account cards for the installment buyers and used a secret code to brand each one as a good risk, doubtful, or bad. The business was full of promise had Germany not gone berserk.

It was only twenty days after the store's grand opening that Adolf Hitler became Germany's chancellor. The Führer was a well-advertised phenomenon. He and his brown-shirted hoodlums had demonstrated their skill at government by blaming economic distress on the Jews and by bashing skulls, even in little Weissenfels, of people like Herr Franz, my nursemaid's husband, because he called himself a socialist. The Jews and socialists of Weissenfels, and also a great many other people, were uneasy about the Führer's accession. But many expected the Nazis to fail and disappear in short order; they had promised much too much, it was said. Others were more impressed that this charismatic foreigner, an Austrian, so well understood Germany's humiliation in war and desperation after economic collapse. Like him or not, most Germans said, Hitler came to power lawfully, a very important fact in such a fastidious society.

Germany's failure to distinguish between the lawful and the just allowed the Nazis to run wild. But brutal despotism was not a uniquely German phenomenon in midcentury Europe. Utopian fascism, like communism, exalted the power of the state and defined the word totalitarian as benign. In any case, the law by which the Nazis governed was not human law or natural law, only national law, and wherever a choice appeared between national ambition and some higher moral force, the Nazis were more forthright than most regimes about their priorities: revenge, recovery, and room to breathe--Lebensraum. Thus were millions of Germans brought to believe that their Germanity took priority over their humanity.
In our town, folks began to waver about this choice on Saturday, April 1, 1933, the day on which the Nazis ordered a nationwide boycott of every Jewish business. Two brown-shirted storm troopers patrolled the front of our store with signs instructing people not to buy from Jews; presumably, they also carried blackjacks to enforce the request. No one came that day. But on the following Monday, my third birthday, the troopers were gone and a good number of our faithful patrons returned, some through the front door and a fair number, including Gestapo detectives, through a back door. They were elaborately apologetic about the boycott and asked forgiveness for their cowardice. You know how it is, they kept saying, and they guiltily purchased an extra sheet or dress. In a sense, we Jews were fortunate to have been spared their humiliating dilemma.

Still, maybe half our customers gradually disappeared, and the least honest among them even stopped paying their debts. Jewish lawyers soon lost the right to press our claims in court. Hitler's 1,000-mark bonus for newlyweds could no longer be redeemed in Jewish stores. Some of our non-Jewish competitors atoned for their greedy pursuit of our customers by paying Pop "commissions" for "referrals." The Jewish owners of large department stores in Leipzig and Berlin were thrown into panic; they advertised frantically that they no longer employed Jewish salesclerks so that customers could be assured of dealing only with pure Aryans. Some of their suddenly unemployed clerks arrived in Weissenfels, where our Jewish community tried to absorb them. But no amount of improvisation could long shield us from the rain of Nazi decrees.

Over the next two years, Jews were barred from most professions and even from most public places. The Jewish salesmen who supplied our store were forbidden to enter hotels and restaurants and could barely function. We could no longer sit in the coffeehouse or go to the movies or swim at the Saale River beach. Mom's dressmaker no longer found time for her orders, and her beautician no longer granted appointments. By the end of 1935, even the minimally Jewish German Jews, who had successfully camouflaged themselves and whom we Easterners derisively called yekkes (probably because they wore Jacken--jackets) had been stripped of their German citizenship. Such Germans became Jews again, even if they were only half Jews, quarter Jews, or one-eighth Jews. Those who had struggled hardest to acquire the coloration of their surroundings were among the most conspicuous now that their environment was transformed. They no longer fit in anywhere.

By necessity, the Jews of Weissenfels drew themselves into a tighter community. They founded Zionist clubs and prepared their youngsters for flight to Palestine. The Jewish Agency, looking to claim that holy land by outnumbering the Arabs, recruited settlers under the age of thirty-five and also "capitalists" of any age if they paid their way with 1,000 smuggled English pounds (about $5,000) each. Older folks thought of leaving, too, but the fear of change, the dread of a new language, the separation from relatives, and the loss of familiar comforts held them back. They would tolerate segregation and discrimination for a time and vied in the invention of new hopes: they might be legally exchanged to some other country (Madagascar was prominently mentioned); surely the 1936 Olympics in Berlin would require the Nazis to display a new spirit of tolerance; maybe Hitler would overreach and fall from power, or the civilized world, whatever that was, would finally intervene and throw him out. Much as safety often produces dread of disaster, fear created endless hallucinations of rescue. The more miserable our condition, the more certain we became that it would not, could not, get worse. No one even imagined death camps.

In those still early Nazi years, only two Weissenfels Jews were actually arrested: young Hoffman, the playboy son of a cattle dealer, and young Tasselkraut, a salesman's son, both in their early twenties. Hoffman, people thought, went to a dance with a non-Jewish girl and probably infuriated some Nazi suitor. Tasselkraut's offense has been forgotten, though the charge against both was something about reading forbidden newspapers. Their sentence was a year in Buchenwald, the nearest concentration camp. Both were released after two months on condition that they leave the country. Hoffman went to Palestine, Tasselkraut to Britain. It's assumed that their parents paid handsome ransoms; indeed, extortion may have been the impetus for their arrests. The non-Jews who still confided in the Fränkels were suspicious of the legal proceedings, but they could not bring themselves to concede that the boys were altogether innocent. Maybe they were Communists, people said, with a delusionary logic that I would encounter again in many places.

I remember Pop and his closest friend, Hermann Birnbach, whispering over chess about how Hoffman had been warned not to discuss his experiences in Buchenwald. Their whispering was a sure sign that they were again debating the pros and cons of leaving Germany. The isolation and persecution of Jews were clearly intended to drive us out. Since no one expected to be killed, and since so much income had already been lost, there seemed to be time to plan an orderly exit. The chess players whispered about smugglers who took money, jewels, and even people across borders for exorbitant fees, and they speculated about assorted havens. By collecting the coupons of the hundreds of packs of cigarettes that Papa and Birnbach smoked on these evenings, I acquired an illustrated album about the 1936 Berlin Olympics and learned the flags of all the countries that were so urgently under review: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Australia, Poland, Britain, Italy, and, again and again, the United States, more often called by the paradisial name of America.

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