From Mud to Lotus: I Meant to Behave, but There Were Too Many Other Options

Prologue:

Berlin, 1933

“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.”

~ Elie Weisel

“We are Germans first, Hilda—don’t forget it.” Grandma Selma, lean- ing into the metal barrier that separated them from the main city of Berlin, stood near her friend in a foul-smelling alley of the ghetto filled with dirt and trash. “The Nazis are not getting our wedding rings.”

Hilda grabbed Selma by her skinny arms, shook her, and tried to pull her away from the fence toward the center of the ghetto. “Can’t you see, you stubborn thing? Look! There are the big tanks with the SS by the fountain. Haven’t you seen enough brutality and executions during the last few weeks to put the fear of God into you?”

“With Max gone,” Selma whispered, “the rings are the only precious things I possess. They represent love and loyalty. Those brutes are ani- mals. The rings will go to Harry, our only family member to be saved so far.” The chilling wind sent fog out of her mouth as she spoke. “I am not moving away from this fence until I find someone to take them.”

She stood belligerently, buttoned her thin black coat with its yellow JEW star on the sleeve, and faced the outside world. The chill made her shiver. She turned her back momentarily to the street, against the wind. “Don’t try to stop me, Hilda. We will join the rest of the prisoners in a matter of moments. Just keep watch. Let me know if the SS guards come this way.”

Selma tidied her straw-like black hair with her fingers, turned, and smiled at two passersby on the street. She waved her hand at them through the fence. “Hey, you!” The couple lowered their eyes and hur- ried on.

“At least don’t be so loud,” Hilda whispered. “How do you know a stranger will give Harry the rings? What if they just take them like the greedy Nazis?”

“Anything is better than giving the rings to those pigs!”

A tall, tanned, blond young man was passing by very close to the metal barrier. He stretched his neck to see what was going on, his eyes widening at gunshots echoing down the alley.

“He looks like a nice man, maybe the age of our son Harry,” Selma said to shivering Hilda. Louder, she called out toward the young man. “Hey, you, come here a moment!”

He stopped. “What is going on? What is all this commotion?” He spoke with a foreign accent.

“Come closer, young man. We will tell you. We don’t want them to hear us.” She jerked her head toward the fountain where the SS held Jews at gunpoint. “There is not much time to talk now. This is a Jewish ghetto. The Nazis, the SS police will come any moment to get more of us. They treat us like stray dogs. They strip us of everything, and they are cruel! Please, these are my husband’s and my precious wedding rings. The rings mean nothing to the SS pigs, but they mean everything to us. Please! Here! They are in this envelope with my son’s address, right here in Berlin. Please, find our son. He is at the dental school. Give him our rings. It is a mitzvah you are doing, truly. It is the only way our son will know we are still alive and where we are, please!”

“A mitzvah? What is a mitzvah?”

“A good deed. It will bring you blessings.”

“Selma.” Hilda pulled her from the gate. “We’ve got to go; we have to run and hide, fast—they’ve seen us talking to a stranger. They’re coming. Run! Forget about the rings. Come!”

Grandma dropped the envelope into the young man’s hands, and she and Hilda disappeared into a building.

“What are you doing here?” barked the SS guard, glaring at the young man fumbling in his pocket.

“I am just a passerby, a tourist from Australia. What is all the com- motion by the fountain back there?”

“Oh, just an organizational meeting,” said the SS officer. “Now be gone. It is not a good idea to stop here. This is not a tourist attraction. Go on.”

As he was leaving, the tourist saw the woman who had given him the rings, and her friend come out of the house under guard, marching obediently in front of rifles, joining others just like them.

Fla t o w , 1 933.

During spring break, twenty-three-year-old blue-eyed Harry took the ten-hour train ride from Berlin to the village of Flatow in North-West Prussia. Outside the village was the family farm that supplied the grain storage business in the little town. He was eager to see his family; it had been months.

The village was quiet. This was unusual, but he dismissed it in his eagerness to see his parents and his brother. It was a sunny, breezy day, and the handsome and athletic young man was happy to be done with his studies for a while and come home to help. He passed his father’s silo in town, closed this early in the morning. Where the road turned, he would get his first glimpse of the farmhouse just beyond. . . . He stopped in his tracks, confused. Where was the house? What was that smoke? He began to run, yelling, “Mami! Papi! Omi!” The house and barn were burnt to the ground. There were ashes in the air and a ter- rible smell came from it all. Copper-colored smoke drifted into the blue sky. There were no more family members; no parents and no brother to greet him. He staggered through the muddy field to the neighboring farm, which was undamaged, silent, and comfortable in the otherwise pretty daylight. He was weeping when he came upon Herr Van Brunnen, the neighbor. “What happened here? Where is everybody?” he cried.

Full-bellied and nervous, the neighbor looked with sympathy at Harry. “The Nazis came several days ago, Harry. Your family ran. They escaped.”

“Escaped? What does that mean? Where did they go?” asked Harry, confused.

“I am not sure. Berlin, perhaps?”

“What did the Nazis want with them? What did they do?” Now Harry was yelling, anger filling his veins.

The neighbor shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe because of the cen- sus in ’29. Your family was on some list. As a student, you might not have been aware of it.”

“Why on a list? What list? Couldn’t Herr Stein have prevented it?” “Actually. . ..” Herr Van Brunnen scratched his ear. “On the night

the Nazi Party came to power, the chief of police—who, as you may remember, respected your father and your family since they went to school together—had warned Max that all Jewish merchants were to be arrested the next day. He told your father, “You and the family had better leave Flatow immediately.”

Harry looked at the old fellow as if he had lost his mind. Nothing made sense.

“So,” continued Herr Van Brunnen, unable to look at the boy, “your father and your brother took the 3:00 A.M. train to Berlin. The next day, Nazi thugs smashed up your home and part of the grain store- house and burned his farm.”

“But what about Mami and Omi?”

“Your mother didn’t want to believe it, and she wouldn’t leave. The two of them hid in the cellar when the Nazis came and broke ev- erything up and set fire to it all. Everyone in the village could hear the commotion.”

“Did you all help them?”

The old man examined his boots. “How long were they in the cellar?”

“Until everything went silent and the fire burnt itself out. A day or two, I suppose. When they came out, they looked shaken. And suddenly quite old. They took the next train. Your mother told me to tell you if you came that they were joining family in Berlin. I am not sure if they made it or exactly where they may have ended up.”

Flushed, shaking his head back and forth like a dog, holding his breath in so he would look strong, Harry said, “I will find them and get them back home.”

He picked up his rucksack and walked away. Eventually—he had no idea how long he had been waiting—he stepped onto a train car at the station. It was filled with soldiers. He did not look back at the dis- appearing village nor at the smoke spewing from the farm. When he arrived in Berlin, he went straight to the family apartment. No one answered the door.

He knocked at a neighbor’s. No response. He heard shuffling in- side, though, and knew someone was there. With youthful, impulsive desperation, Harry made his way to the Gestapo office.

“Is the Drucker family here? I am trying to find them,” he asked the guard standing outside the building.

“Who are you?” blasted the SS officer sharply, looking Harry up and down and then at the list in his hand . “Where do you live? Show me your papers!”

“You are not on the list.” The guard narrowed his eyes, looking at Harry intensely as if to measure his faults . “If you don’t leave right now, you will be in the same ghetto where they are. Get lost! Now!”

He ran to the family apartment, this time searching for the hidden key. Letting himself in, he packed a few precious things and disappeared to the home of one of his dental school friends. He crashed in their living room for the night. The next day he learned that a few hours after he had left the apartment, the SS had come looking for him.

Harry hid in a different home each night for a week until he had arranged a way to leave Germany. He escaped to Palestine. He never saw his parents again. He knew nothing of the rings.

Part I: Motherland 1940-1967

Chapter One:

Palestine, 1940

Dr. Moshe Wallace, who served as both hospital director and rabbi, walked from room to room in the wards singing “Eliyahu Hanavi” fol- lowed by “Shavua Tov.” Three stars shone in the sky outside the win- dows of Shaarei Zedek, the first large hospital built in the western portion of Jerusalem. It sat on Jaffa Road on the outskirts of town. The doctor proceeded through the birthing unit where my mother lay, de- claring the transition from the sacred Sabbath to the coming mundane week, waving the ritual holder of clove incense back and forth as he moved from room to room reciting the weekly prayer.

I was born, my mom Ima told me, as Dr. Wallace sang and walked down that hall past her room while the Sabbath ended. It was sunset after a sunny, wintry December day. My dad, Harry Leo Drucker, whom I called Abba—a tall dentist with blazing sky-blue eyes and broad shoulders—was restlessly pacing the corridor. He wasn’t prepared to have a child and had wanted my mother to abort the baby. Whatever that gynecologist named Dr. Oppenheimer had done when he gave Ima the abortifacient shot was obviously to no avail. I arrived anyway. My Ima—Eva Weil Drucker—her curly raven hair pulled up in hairpins above her plump, Mongolian-like face, was elated and exhausted. She sang along with the rabbi as he passed by.

It was seven years after Abba had first arrived in Israel when we all returned from the new hospital to our home on Marcus Street. In those days, Palestine was still mostly desert, where camels passed through on the main thoroughfares. Even though a gravel road led to our street and winds full of dust were all we knew, the Talbiya neighborhood was considered elegant and spacious.

There were many yekkes who lived in this community.

Yekke is a cynical term for stuffy German-Jewish immigrants who chose to stick to their German culture. They stayed together in their own neighborhoods, in their heavy European suits and jackets, despite the scorching sun of the Palestine summers. After the main meal at lunch time, they liked their quiet, called schlaf stunde, the routine of taking an undisturbed afternoon nap between two and four every day.

My earliest recollection was of our eight-room apartment on the first floor of a large two-story house. It was on a street with only a few villas along a dusty gravel lane and much untouched land inhabited by weeds, spiders, and scorpions. On the upper floor of our house lived a well-to-do Arab family with whom we had little contact and no strife, despite the tension between Arabs and Jews on the streets of Jerusalem. To me, a friendly child mostly preoccupied with food, which was sparse, life was simple and being hungry was normal. The rooms in our house were arranged around an inner courtyard shaped like a loaf of bread, and there were black and white marble tiles throughout the house. The main entrance door—iron, engraved, and rusty—opened onto our dirt front yard, where my sandbox sat to the left. Beyond the fence lay the dusty street. Dazzling purple, pink, and white passionfruit flowers wound through the iron fence, and one of my favorite things was to suck the honey from the blossoms.

By 1948, a building frenzy of apartments accompanied the emer- gence of the state of Israel, and the influx of new immigrants diminished the spaciousness in our neighborhood. As the refugees came off the boats, Israel could not keep up with the need for new housing. The eight-room house I had known since I was a young child was divided into four separate apartments.

Ima decorated the living room (between the eight doors leading to all the other rooms) with pictures of women’s faces, nature scenes, and animals. She dreamed of having an art gallery someday and pretended that our home was one. I particularly loved the drawing of a beautiful brown hare by the painter Dürer, which I would dreamily look at as we ate our meager meals of greens picked from the side of the road, olives, and bread. How I loved bread! The kitchen, which was rarely used ex- cept to heat water for my bath, was in the back of the house. A back door opened onto the backyard, where grapes hung from a peeling, white lattice awning. I liked to pick the grapes and take little bites out of them, even if they were dusty, unripe, and sour. The bees hovered over the grapes and often prevented me from indulging. Scruffy out- door chairs and a crooked table under the awning formed our summer gathering place. A sad fig tree stood at the end of the yard by the shed. Sometimes I was given a soft ripe fig to eat. My favorite!

Our dog and a beautiful white rabbit with red eyes lived in the yard. The rabbit was my best friend in the world. “I am happy to see you!” I would say to him. And he was happy to see me; I knew it because he squeaked and moved his little mouth up and down, showing his front teeth as if he was smiling. I loved feeding him and watching him chew. I would stand for long moments and squeal with laughter as I watched his happy, funny face; his twitching nose, and his long silky ears. I gave him grass, weeds, and flowers as he stuck his mouth out of the fenced cage to speak with me and chew the greens. The rabbit liked to eat as much as I did, and I shared with him my hubeza, the green mallow fruit that I called mamam. Yummy.

Chapter Two:

The Mud—Toddler years.

The Arab family upstairs kept sheep in the open field beyond the front of the house, which seemed to me an endless, parched desert. The son, who was the shepherd, never talked to me, nor I to him. I often watched him from my sandbox as he sat on a big rock playing a recorder among the matted dry hubeza, shrubs, and loose rocks. His music calmed me, as did his sheep, and sometimes I fell asleep in my sandbox to his songs. To the left of the sheep field was the rose garden. This is where my mother often took me to meet her best friend. The garden’s roses of

all colors tumbled like laughter along a stone path. In summer, this rainbow of flowers was an oasis, and it smelled better than the special rose soap that my mother, Ima, coveted. Sometimes she laid me out to get sun on our little balcony—me all covered in sticky olive oil—but what I liked best was when she took me to the rose garden in the stroller. There she would let me out to totter around as she sat and gossiped with our neighbor and her friend, Gabrielle. I loved the garden’s slippery stone paths, and it seemed to me the flowers nodded as I passed. They listened to me as I reached out to smell their fragrance and touch their silky leaves.

Gabrielle lived near us on our graveled street. A big limestone building kitty-corner to her house was the British Mandate head- quarters, the local British police. Gabrielle had a son who was the only other yekke kid on our street. He was three or four years older than I was, and his haughty look intimidated me. He avoided me, so I had no choice but to reciprocate.

At home, the radio was on all the time, and when the news began, everything in the house stopped. I wanted to find the man in a suit in- side the radio machine talking in staccato. He must be a real little man. More than once I tiptoed behind the machine to find him. But the box was locked, it was hot to the touch, and it smelled like burnt plastic. Once I asked, “How does this little man with such a big voice fit into the radio? And why is he locked up? How come he is hiding?”

Ima looked around to catch my father’s eyes, and they burst into contented laughter. I didn’t understand why or what it was they enjoyed about the little man. “But . . .” I said.

“Hush, listen! Maybe there is news about Abba’s parents or someone we know.” I had learned that my father’s parents and brother were “missing.”