She lived her life to the fullest—her adventures and stories will be passed down from generation to generation.
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My mom saved us from the Nazis.
Strictly speaking, her father, my Opa, should get the credit since he decided it was time to flee Germany.
But just as nature abhors a vacuum, a good story hates a precise recording of history.
The account of my family’s flight from the National Socialists has a few variants. But in the most memorable version, my mom’s reflexive, stiff-armed salute and accompanying “Heil Hitler” charmed a pair of soldiers, who let them pass out of the country.
Mom was born in 1931 in Niederad, a suburb of Frankfurt. Two years later, her father, who was teaching at the university, was fired for being Jewish.
But mom was blissfully insulated, even when the Nazis made them officially rootless in 1935, stripping all Jews of German citizenship.
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There was talk about staying, waiting out the brownshirts. After all, Opa considered himself assimilated; had even renounced his Judaism, however you do that.
But a family friend had already beaten a path to Turkey, where Muslims were saving Jews from Christians. I think about that circuit of salvation and faith today.
Whether the family escape was actually propelled by my mother’s guilelessness and blonde hair (from her gentile mother,) they stumbled from Switzerland to Genoa, and finally to Istanbul. Mom made the trip with her tiny lungs wracked with whooping cough.
Life in Turkey was close enough to paradise, even as the Reich gnawed at the edges of Eden. Every morning, mom traveled from Kadikoy, Asia across the Bosporus, to Europe and the English High School for Girls. A trans-continental morning commute.
She reveled in the romance of the daily steamboat, listening to the blended cries of gulls and yogurt vendors, each waddling along the Sea of Marmara. She adored her tutor Tanta Gerturde, who taught her to knit by hiding gum and chocolates and other miniature presents in a fat ball of yarn, only revealed when mom completed enough stitches. Later, she even had a randy older boyfriend, who swam with her in the ocean, then rinsed the salt from her hair.
So many experienced the war as hardship and horror. Mom’s cousins, for example, were sent to England as part of the Kindertransport, and didn’t see their parents for almost a decade. But mom was blissfully insulated, even when the Nazis made them officially rootless in 1935, stripping all Jews of German citizenship.
I like to tell the story that way because it’s true to her colorful adaptations of life.
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In 1945, my grandparents and mother returned to Germany. To Opa, academic civilization was in the heart of Europe, even if it was a civilization that produced Zyklon B, the V-2 rocket, and tidy timetables to Dachau.
But mom remained a wanderer, unafraid of a new address. She made homes in Santa Fe, Capri, and the Canary Islands. She loved each place, but then, in a manner that seemed impetuous to the rest of us, she’d suddenly close up shop. Move to the next point on the map. Maybe, because of her childhood, she had no clear nationality, no fixed home. Or maybe it was her hyperthyroidism.
I can’t say for sure my mom saved us from the Nazis, but I like to tell the story that way because it’s true to her colorful adaptations of life. She didn’t lie exactly. It’s more like she exaggerated with style. The fault lines between fact and fiction were both irretrievable and irrelevant.
Did her friend, Hedy, really bite the tongue off a lover in a moment of transcendent passion? Was the dress mom wore to the Nobel Prize awards actually a five dollar thrift store purchase as she claimed? Even asking these questions seemed unfair; beside the point.
And when my time comes? When it’s my chance to pass on or edit or even delete her stories?
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And that’s because mom was a consummate story teller, and her best stories were her own. Her life was exotic and varied and dense with euphoria and heartache and dreamscapes, whose details and verity, I’ll never know.
But this much seems clear enough: she was born at the chronological and geographic edge of cataclysm. She absconded to Turkey where she swam with dolphins between continents. She emigrated to the United States, and later made a home on an island off the coast of Africa, to help her second husband study the stars.
It’s a story that tells almost like a fairy tale, although definitely one with a dark thread.
Her other tales were just the same. Mom told stories to entertain and engage, but also to shock and make people uncomfortable, or just because something was on her mind. She told me once she took comfort in knowing someday I would die and be absorbed by the earth, just as she is now.
But when I remember mom, I try to think about dolphins and yogurt vendors. Or the way she smacked her lips when she ate simit, bread rings covered in sesame seeds. I recall her apocryphal account of pelican mothers who tear out their own hearts to feed their young. I understood what she was trying to say.
And when my time comes? When it’s my chance to pass on or edit or even delete her stories? When I’m the only gatekeeper for her truths?
I’m going to tell my grandkids she saved us from the Nazis.
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Photo: GettyImages
She was one of a kind and this is a wonderful tribute. Thanks for sharing. I miss her gregarious, loving presence in our lives.
Amazing story, Bruce, and excellent writing in the telling of it. Makes me wish I’d gotten to know you and your family better when we were kids in Swarthmore. All the best,
Ted
From Generation to Generation. I hope you pass on your mom’s sense of adventure to your kids. Thanks so much for sharing this!
So glad you enjoyed it! So far my son has been to Australia and my daughter to Vietnam – so I think they got it…
What a truly amazing Mother’s day remembrance.
Thanks, Roger!