Sam appeared to notice a figure outside and once again rose from his chair.
“Here”, and the index finger of his right hand was pointing at a man walking past, “goes one of your top men, erect and rigid - a fanatic!”
Sam’s face was contorted, barely able to conceal his anger and apprehension. I looked outside and saw a glimpse of Heinz Rutha’s pale and motionless face. He was crossing the open square.
“What do you mean, one of our top men?”
“I am not one of your party members,” Sam’s voice had returned to normal octave but had an icy chill to it.
“At times those on the outside looking in understand more of what is happening. Rutha is not only part of Henlein’s inner circle, but Henlein follows much of his counsel,” he continued.
I could not conceal my amazement. I was aware that Rutha was one of Henlein’s confidants. But to learn from Sam of Rutha’s importance driving the nationalistic fervor was unsettling.
“In our eyes, Henlein only executes what Rutha plans and decides,” Sam added. “Us Jews have become irrelevant at best, more likely targeted by him.”
It had become evident to me that we were not about to find common ground. To expect anything like it had been idealistic, no, more than that, supremely naive on my part.
Just then, Petrova returned with a large tray of coffee and home-baked chocolate-walnut Viennese cake. Given the life and death implications of the subject we had been discussing, I was surprised at the lack of emotional outburst, Sam’s earlier irritation notwithstanding. It seemed that our relative civility was a measure of the futility and resignation we all felt.
I decided to turn the conversation in a slightly different direction.
“Any thoughts of leaving the country? I understand the Landsbergs went to London last week.”
Leon Landsberg’s father had opened their dental practise the same year Miriam’s father became the local family doctor.
“And just give all this up? Walk away from it - for what, to where? What are you thinking?”
Sam’s voice was about to rise again.
Again, Hedi’s intuitive sense came to my rescue.
“We don’t want to see you get hurt, if things get worse - and we all seem to feel they well might.
Miriam and I have close personal friends from boarding school, whose families are in influential positions, one in England, the other in the United States. They may be able to help.”
Miriam had been listening quietly for a while and broke the silence in our conversation. She pointed to the tray in front of us.
“Thank you, Hedi. We have some thinking to do and decisions to make. But now let’s enjoy this and perhaps talk about other subjects.”
When we parted later that afternoon, I had the distinct feeling that an important chapter in my life was ending and what was to follow was anything but clear, perhaps daunting.
Chapter 2
Munich, August 1998
I recalled the first time I had walked down the narrow steps leading to the small basement of Edi’s house a few years earlier. I had been stunned at the sight that awaited me. Several large shelves were spread across the room.
Perched on top were row upon row of heavy-duty ‘Leitz Ordners’, large and clunky compressed cardboard binders with two-hole steel prongs and a ‘mouse-trap’ closure. The binders stood rigid like so many soldiers on parade, memorial slates in salute of those, whose life stories they contained. Theirs were stories of lesser or greater misfortune, of surrender and of triumph of the human spirit in the face of stark adversity.
Rachel had declined to join me on this trip, consistent with our growing estrangement. It had taken a few weeks to persuade my son Simon, seventeen then, to part with his buddies for a couple of weeks to join his father in Europe.
We had managed to get a direct charter flight from Halifax into Munich-Riem. Before taking the S7 train to Edi’s house, Simon had walked over to the information board with the multi-coloured grid of suburban train connections inside Greater Munich. The S7 pointed a crooked line, like an admonishing finger, northwest toward Dachau. Days later, our visit to the camp had left a deep and lasting impression on both of us. There was the foreboding black wrought iron structure at the entrance with the single door insert. Above it, the Nazi slogan: ‘Arbeit macht frei’.
After a few days in Munich, Edi had accompanied both of us on our drive north to the Czech Republic, having separated from its Slovakian neighbour to the south some five years earlier. Reichenberg – now called Liberec – was our destination, after brief stops in Pilzen to visit the famous brewery and also Prague, where Edi had spent a couple of years in boarding school during the mid thirties. When our car pulled up in front of the hotel in Liberec, we noticed the barely visible, washed out writing on the side wall. ‘Goldener Loewe’, it said, no longer a proclamation of welcome, but simply a reminder of days long past. The brightly illuminated, garishly red translation of ‘Zlaty Lev’ now shouted at us from the main entrance.
“This place was filled with townsfolk in their finest for your grandfather’s silver wedding anniversary.”
I remembered hearing my mother’s voice. We had looked at old photos together in her nursing home years earlier. It would be the last time I would see her alive.
Our trio had climbed the red carpeted stairs leading to the spacious front lobby of the hotel. Edi had struck up a conversation with the receptionist. Ever since crossing the border into the Czech Republic earlier that day, he had taken delight in practicing his remaining knowledge of the language on unassuming passersby. Who in our grandfather’s wedding party might have slept in the room Simon and I were about to occupy?
The rich luster of expansive mahogany paneling had faded, some of it replaced by darkened and stained wallpaper. Where presumably there had been gleaming floors and thick carpets once, cheap vinyl tiles had been installed. And over at the dining room bar, where the hotel had once catered to royalty, city luminaries, high-ranking Nazi and finally Russian officers, now were what appeared to be a couple of hookers plying their trade, hoping for business to pick up before the night was over.
And was this not the ballroom where the ‘Schlaraffia Order’ had met more than sixty years earlier, when the menacing sound of a thousand boots in goosestep had not been heard – yet? The place where those that were still believing in mankind had placed themselves knowingly into harms way.
Edi had been our perfect guide then. He proudly proclaimed that he had been back numerous times since retiring half a dozen years earlier, when researching the past had become his present, much to the chagrin of some of those close to him.
We only stayed at the hotel for the first night. For the next several nights, Edi had arranged private quarters for us. In the attic of the house of an old Czech university friend on the outskirts of Liberec. Two sleeping spaces had been separated by some linens hung from the ceiling with a make-shift kitchen, breakfast table and chairs on the other side. When I awoke one morning two days later, Simon was seated at the table with a sheet of paper and pencil.
“I am trying to figure out the family connections,” he remarked while drawing a family tree on the paper. Touched and surprised by his interest, I offered help; yet it fell to Edi later that morning to complete the circle by filling in the names in all of the blank squares.