Letters From the Lost (31 page)

Out of curiosity, one Saturday morning I went to the living room of the
rented house where Or Shalom held its weekly service. The service itself seemed, if not actually alien, then certainly odd and unfamiliar.

I had attended Sunday school in the United Church of Canada. I attended because my parents had wanted me to have some knowledge of religion, because our next-door neighbours were willing to take me to church every Sunday, and because my parents had wanted to protect me from the centuries-old hatred that had destroyed their own lives.

I brought home and treasured the pamphlets given to me at Sunday school. They showed a blond, blue-eyed Christ healing the lepers, blessing children, and riding a donkey on the way to Jerusalem. Later, when we moved from the farm to the city, I again found myself in the United Church, home to Canadian Girls in Training. I proudly wore the cgit white blouse, dark tie, and assorted badges of achievement.

I was ten years old when my parents became members of the Jewish Reform congregation whose services they had attended for the High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Much as he loved my mother, my father was reluctant to attend services. He deemed twice a year to be more than enough religion.

It was mostly an awareness of the passing years that triggered official synagogue membership. As my mother put it,
“We have to belong somewhere. If we don’t belong, they won’t bury us if, God forbid, ‘something’ should happen. I don’t like the idea of worms eating my body, but it is better than the alternative.”
That was as close as my mother could come to stating that given how her parents had died, cremation was out of the question.

My father always insisted that being a decent person is what matters above all. In Europe, his family had known that they were Jewish because it said so on their birth certificate, just as it does on mine. No one in my father’s family had ever paid much attention to religion. They ate pork roast and sausages along with their neighbours and attended the same village school. It was a precursor of my own experience in Canada except that here it was bologna and hot dogs.

That Saturday morning at Or Shalom introduced me to another world. From those long ago High Holiday services I attended as a child, I remembered only one prayer:
Shema Ysrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad,
the
age-old affirmation that there is but one God. What moved me deeply at Or Shalom was the music. On the farm, my favourite song had been “Jesus loves me, this I know.” Later, I had often sung “Rock of Ages.” Now, the Jewish melodies awakened something deep within me.

One song in particular thawed my frozen heart. “
Barchu
. Dear One.
Shechinah
. Holy Name. When I call on the light of my soul, I come home. ” I wept from the moment the voices of the congregation rose until after they faded away. As the silent tears rolled down my cheeks, I knew that I had indeed come home.

Something changed for me that day. I’m reluctant to call myself “religious” or even “spiritual.” There are days when I still question the existence of a personal God and even more days when I wrestle with the validity of biblical passages and their traditional interpretation. Nonetheless, there has been a major shift in how I think and feel and experience the world. At the very least, I have peeled off a layer of the onion and reached a millimetre closer to knowing the core of my own being.

————

WHEN I BROUGHT MY
mother to Vancouver to spend her last years with me, she too had a sense of coming home and asked to be buried in the Jewish cemetery here.

At her funeral, sadness flowed from Jew and non-Jew, from believer and non-believer. For me, there was something quintessentially Canadian that emerged: the best of a world still to be brought fully to fruition.

Integrating my own world and that of my family into contemporary Canadian awareness is another facet of coming home. My Canada is both a world of smug citizens and a land of diverse peoples who acknowledge their separate ways of being and perceiving. It is a land that means well, but has done harm to many groups. Still, what characterizes my Canada is its willingness to learn from the past.

I needed to face my own past. The time had come. I would start with a visit to my place of birth. A year after my mother’s death, I returned to Europe.

A
FTER AGREEING TO RENDEZVOUS
with Rick in Prague in mid-August, I booked a flight that would allow me some time to travel on my own. Primarily, I wanted to go back to Linz where the Fränkels had lived to see if there was more information in the archives. I also wanted to spend time with my friends Tracey and Martin, and if possible, take them up on their offer to drive with me to Strobnitz, my hometown in the Czech Republic.

In the 1960s, I had tried to enter Czechoslovakia when it was still under communist control. Although the border guards had showed no interest in my American travel companions, one look at my place of birth resulted in my passport being confiscated for over an hour. As we sat in the hot car under a blazing summer sun, the guards grilled me, asking again and again for names of “contacts,” and mocking my claim not to speak Czech. When at last I was allowed to enter, it was only on condition that I accept a “tour guide” who accompanied my every step. She sat sullenly at our table while we drank watery coffee and she leaned impatiently against the cubicle when I visited the washroom. She directed us to a souvenir kiosk and watched as we spent the requisite number of dollars on a few cheaply made
trinkets. When we returned to the border crossing, there were more delays. The guards removed the back seat and placed the car on a hoist to ensure that I was not smuggling Czech citizens out of the country.

This time, entering the Czech Republic was much simpler. After a leisurely breakfast in their kitchen, I followed Tracey and Martin to their car and we drove along the river and out of the city. Despite a steady drizzle, the cheerful countryside buoyed our spirits. Tidy houses with flowers cascading from painted window boxes alternated with orchards pregnant with ripening fruit and with prosperous farmland where cows grazed in rich green meadows.

The border crossing stood in sharp contrast to the bucolic Austrian scenery. Grey cement-block buildings peppered with grey-faced guards in drab, one-size-fits-all uniforms. An indifferent guard stamped my passport. The guard yawned as he lifted the flimsy wooden barrier. We drove through to a barren road lined with prostitutes in cheap glamour outfits. Some were in stiletto heels, others in thigh-high boots. All wore ultra-short skirts and tight tops despite the driving rain. Most were young. Behind them lay nothing but deserted fields and overgrown woods.

Martin sensed our discomfort. For him, the scene was not new.
“It’s dreadful, ”
he said.
“Human misery as an announcement of economic adversity. There are rows of prostitutes at all the border crossings into the Czech Republic. It’s the only thing they have to sell.”

Faces blurred as our car rushed forward. Only the relentless click-clack of the wipers broke the dismal silence. Muffled, the countryside flowed past the windows. Grey clouds hung shroud-like over endless fields of corn broken by occasional clusters of dilapidated houses whose sagging roofs pressed upon walls long since leached of colour. No flower boxes adorned these windows, and no gardens bloomed in plots where rusting equipment sank into narrow strips of weed. Hopelessness was written everywhere, and it seeped even into the sealed car.

At last, we spotted the sign:
Horní Stropnice.
Only in my memory did its former name
Strobnitz
survive. I looked at my watch. It was only 1:30 in the afternoon, although the lowering sky made it seem later. The village was dreary beyond belief. A cheerless hamlet of unrelieved grey. Ashen cement blocks beneath an ashen sky. Not a single pedestrian was scurrying for cover. The inhabitants had hunkered down in their gloomy caves. Not one welcoming light shone.

My hometown village, Strobnitz, is shuttered and unwelcoming

Our house was easy to find. Number 36 is one slice of a long, single two-storied block of grey cement that reaches from one street to the next. A row of colourless signs announces a variety of stores and businesses on the ground floor. Upstairs on this sunless afternoon, faded chintz curtains closed off every window. Here and there, an empty window box yawned into the unbroken greyness.

Only one house was different. Number 36. Its storefront had been crudely bricked over in ugly yellowish-brown blocks. I saw it as a clumsy effort to erase the last trace of the Jews who had once lived here. The Jews who were my family.

Tini and her family came here a few years ago. They had told me that the house was right opposite the cenotaph in the centre of the village. I looked at the inscription on the stone slab erected in the midst of a flowerless strip of unmowed grass.
To the brave inhabitants of Horní Stropnice who fell in defence of the homeland.

I paused to untangle the words and their meaning. This area had been predominantly German speaking, and its inhabitants had welcomed the Nazis who promised to reunite them with their German brothers. This meant that those who had “fallen in defence of the homeland” had therefore been killed by Allied hands.

And what about my family? My parents and grandparents had been victims of these very inhabitants whom the inscription sought to memorialize. Tini said that before our wagon reached the edge of town, neighbours had come to ransack the house. Was a favourite plate belonging to my grandmother Fanny now gracing a mantle behind one of those unmoving curtains?

Turning away, I told Tracey and Martin to stay in the car while I took just a few pictures before leaving. I stared at the house. My heart felt as numb as my cold, wet fingers fumbling with the camera. I decided to take one last photo of the entire block from the street corner. From this vantage point, my eye caught sight of a lovely white church, its dome glistening in the rain. Delighted to find beauty in this dismal place, I asked Martin to turn the car around and to follow me.

I walked over to the church, where small groups of people were huddled under black umbrellas. Because it was Saturday afternoon, I assumed that the people were a wedding party. Moving closer, I was certain that I heard German being spoken.

This surprised me as Tini had repeatedly said that my visit would be a waste of time because people in the Czech Republic no longer speak German. Tini knew this not only from her recent visit, but because she and her
family had been among the German-speakers whom the Czechs had unceremoniously booted out after the war.

I approached the nearest group and addressed my questions to a well-dressed man in a suit.

“
You speak German?”

“Of course.”

“Are you from here?”

“Of course.”

“Oh, that’s great because I don’t speak Czech. I am looking for someone who may remember my family. They had a store here. My father was Edmund Waldstein, and his father was Josef Waldstein.”

Silence. Lingering, uncomfortable silence. Wordlessly, the people in the little group eyed one another. Faces blanched. Slowly, the people melted away, as if fleeing into the church. I was left with my hand on the sleeve of the well-dressed man. He watched the backs of his companions. He looked for a long while at his own shoes. Finally he spoke.

“Of course I knew them. Everyone here knew them. We knew them well. But now there is no time to talk. I must go into the church. Come into the church with me and we will talk later.”

I waved Tracey and Martin forward, urging them to join me. Together, we entered through the arched doorway.

The interior of the church was warm and welcoming. Stained glass windows cast flashes of ruby red onto the whitewashed walls. An ornate rococo altar, heavy with gold drew the eye to the cross. To the right, a life-sized Madonna garbed in deep blue stretched both arms toward the congregation. To the left, an intricately carved staircase wound its way to the pulpit. Everywhere, candles flickered, casting their golden glow upon burnished wooden pews.

Already a voice was intoning from the pulpit. I tried to follow, but the thick regional dialect allowed me to catch only isolated words.
Forgiveness. Reconciliation.
I thought these odd words for a wedding, but looked about expectantly for a bride and groom. A hymn and then more disconnected words followed.
Peace. Remembrance. Moderation. Restraint.
I nudged Martin.
“Do you understand?”
He nodded. Relieved that I need not struggle to
decipher the words, I allowed the space and the music to flow around me until the congregation rose to file out.

Politely I shook the hand of the priest planted in the doorway, my eyes already searching for the man in the suit. He was surrounded by people including Martin. Tracey and I waited impatiently. Finally, Martin returned to answer our questions.

Today was August 8, the second Saturday in August. Since the end of World War II, this group had assembled every year at 2 p.m. on the second Saturday of August. They gathered to remember Strobnitz, the town where they had been born and had gone to school, had married, and established new families. The town that the Czechs had forced them to leave after the war. The Czechs had made no distinction between Nazi collaborators and Sudeten-Germans. The Czechs simply drove everyone who spoke German into exile.