CHAPTER
1
THE
SEARCH
Growing up in postwar Austria, my
greatest hope was someday to become an American. A real American, like the
khaki-clad soldiers occupying the country or the cowboys in the westerns at the
local cinema. My father, a refugee from Vienna who
worked on the Nuremberg war
crimes tribunal, promised me that hope would be fulfilled one day. What I
didn’t realize then was that becoming American would cut me off from my roots.
Many years later, after my parents and my brother had died, I resolved to
restore that connection.
***
On a sunny autumn afternoon in 1997, I arrived
with my nine-year-old daughter at the entrance of a long-closed Jewish cemetery
outside Strakonice, in the countryside south of Prague. Thirty-five years after we had left Europe for America, a search worthy of Indiana Jones had brought me
and Coralea here from our home in Los Angeles. Inside, I hoped to find the graves of my
paternal great-grandparents.
Stepping out of the car into a light breeze, I
felt the momentary burst of elation of a marathon runner crossing the finish line.
Then reality interrupted. Pursing my lips, I turned to Coralea.
“I just hope this is the right cemetery,” I said.
“Aunt Mimi told me only that it was near Strakonice, but she didn’t seem sure.
It’s been a long time since she was here.”
“It has to be the right one,” Coralea responded
with the certainty of youth.
Six-foot stucco-encased walls and eight-foot
wrought-iron gates blocked our way. If I could get in, would I find the graves?
How would I read Hebrew inscriptions on the headstones?
I felt as nervous as when I stood before a
federal judge to take my oath of United States citizenship at the age of seventeen. I clasped
Coralea’s left hand. She squeezed back. I took a step toward the gates, then
another and another, with her in tow, until the gates loomed over us like
sentinels. An ancient-looking lock the size of my fist secured chains wrapped
around the innermost bars. I searched for a sign with information on how to
gain entry. A musty smell, a combination of rust and fallen leaves, momentarily
caught my attention. Trembling, I reached out with my left hand, grasped the
rough bars, and shook them. I knew I would not be entering through those gates.
“We’ve come so far,” I said. “We’ve got to get in
there.” Yet, the graves beyond the gates seemed impossibly out of reach.
I thought of the stories of my father’s narrow
escape from Vienna on the eve of World War II, of my mother’s years
in hiding during the war and her harrowing escape, and of their improbable
return to Europe for the Nuremberg trials. I recalled the similarly amazing stories
of survival told by nearly everyone I knew. As my father said, “If they didn’t
have an amazing story, they wouldn’t be here to tell it.”
Turning to Coralea, I said, “I wish my parents
could be here with us.”
“Especially grandma,” she replied with a sigh.
“She wanted to bring me back here so much.”
Closing my eyes, I searched for an answer. My
thoughts rushed back over the unlikely path that had led me to this time and
place.
I recalled my childhood in Austria, just a few hours’ drive away. The Iron Curtain
had blocked us off from our roots for years, just as the cemetery walls
threatened to do now. Although the slaughter was over, the guns were silent,
and the armies mostly had gone home, I lived amid the aftermath of the war --
the bombed cities being rebuilt, the Hitlerhaus that cast a cloud over my
hometown, my refugee nanny Herma, displaced persons in squatters’ camps, and
concentration camp survivors piecing their lives back together.
I remembered my first interactions with Americans
-- the military occupiers, the intelligence agents that gathered at our home
and told wild tales, and my childhood friends in Austria and later in Germany. And the combination of excitement and
apprehension I felt later, realizing I was becoming gradually Americanized. I
marveled at how immigrating and becoming an American citizen had launched me
into a life of political involvement in my adopted country.
Most of all, I thought how much those experiences
had changed my life. I had evolved from a German-speaking, Austrian-born child
of war survivors into an English-speaking American, eagerly drawn into a new
and exciting culture. What I experienced and witnessed in the years after the
war had shaped how I viewed the world, how I interacted with people, and how I
identified myself.
In becoming Americanized, however, I had lost
much of my connection to those early years and to my family’s places of origin.
They had receded behind the more recent people and places of my American
experience.
I opened my eyes, bringing me back to the
present. The gates seemed even more ominous. Still holding my hand, Coralea
looked up at me expectantly. I peered between the bars at the rows of
headstones. The closest ones looked ancient, like those in the old Jewish
cemetery in Prague, with weathered, barely legible Hebrew
lettering. Behind them stood newer markers, taller and more ornate.
Weeds
and grass had so overgrown much of the cemetery that I wondered when anyone had
visited last and opened those gates. Whatever I might find inside, I could not
imagine being denied after coming this far. I struggled to figure out our next
step until Coralea interrupted my thoughts.
“You
can do it, Dad,” she said. “You found this place. You can find a way in.”
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