Cincinnati Occasional Papers in German-American Studies
No. 7, 2005
Prague, Paris, and the Journey to America (Fall 1947)
By Pearl Fichman
Edited by Jerry Glenn and Anna Heran
Click here to print this in booklet form in Adobe PDF
Prague, Paris, and the Journey to America (Fall 1947)
Foreword
Pearl Fichman and her memoir, Before Memories Fade, came to my attention quite by chance. She was born in Czernowitz (at the time Romania, now Ukraine) in 1920, as were Paul Celan and Alfred Gong, both of whom she knew. John Felstiner, Celan scholar par excellence, discovered her memoir and mentioned it to me. I immediately had a three-fold interest: Celan, Gong, and what promised to be a fascinating German-American autobiographical narrative. My tentative assessment was not wrong. It is indeed a fascinating account of the life of a woman who experienced the horrors of reaching maturity as a Jew in Eastern Europe just as the Second World War broke out. For those who would like to read more, the table of contents and several of the chapters are available online: http://www.ibiblio.org/yiddish/Places/Czernowitz/Fichman/. The complete self-published book can be found in a few American libraries.
Czernowitz was the extreme eastern outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1919, when it was allotted to Romania in the aftermath of World War I. Pearl's family, like those of Celan and Gong, retained its German identity. In the first chapter she says that her early youth was "an Austrian way of life"; she learned Romanian, the official national language, in school. The product of a middle-class family—her father owned a wholesale haberdashery — she saw her identity wrenched from her as first the Russians and then the Nazis occupied her beloved hometown. The text presented here is the ninth chapter of the memoir. The first eight describe her (normal) childhood and teenage years, the upheavals of the war and the anti-Semitism of the Nazi years, the trauma of seeing Czernowitz become part of the Soviet Union after the war, fleeing her hometown as a refugee, and spending more than two years in Bucharest before deciding to continue her journey westward. And that is where we pick up her story.
Jerry Glenn
On September 10, 1947, I left Bucharest by train, headed for Prague. The HIAS (Hebrew Immigration Aid Society) sent about ten people on that same train — eight oldsters, myself, and a young woman my age on her way to the United States to marry a cousin she had never met. The two of us were supposed to keep an eye on the entire group and answer any questions about documents at the borders or whatever else might occur. Mary, the other young woman, came from a small town in Transylvania. She spoke Romanian and Hungarian; for the rest I had to step in.
It took about thirty-six hours to arrive in Prague. None of us had any foreign currency — we had no money in any currency, since it was against the law in Romania to take money out of the country. Somebody from HIAS was supposed to await us at the Wilson Railroad Station in Prague. We had left on Friday and arrived early on Sunday morning.
The train filled up in Hungary, and in Czechoslovakia it became overcrowded. I sat next to a Czech, to whom I spoke about all kinds of matters. He was a train conductor and was going home to Prague for a few days leave. He offered to show me his city, but I did not know where I would stay and for how long. Like the "good soldier Schweik," we made an appointment at noon, two days later, at the statue on Wenczeslaw Square. He said that everybody would be able to tell me where it was.
When we got off the train, all ten of us, nobody awaited us. Since it was Sunday morning, there was no answer when we phoned. I had been advised ahead of time to ask directions in Russian, and if the person would not understand me, to ask again in German. The Czechs hated the Germans so bitterly that they would not answer any foreigner who spoke German to begin with. Yet at that time they sympathized with the Russians, who had liberated them from the German fascists. The strategy worked; a local explained to us, Mary and myself, how to reach the HIAS. The older people stayed behind, at the railroad station. But it was not easy to accomplish our task, especially since we had no Czech money for the fare on the street car. The first person I stopped simply turned and left when he heard that we had no money. The second one not only provided the directions but also offered us the car fare.
Soon after we arrived at the HIAS, somebody came to the office. There was a cable instructing them to pick us up at Wilson Station. We reached the others and were eventually put up at a hotel, where we also took our meals and were told that we would leave in five days, on a direct train to Paris.
I met the gentleman from the train on Wenzel Square. Mary had come along with me. We admired the many beautiful bridges across the Vltava (Moldau) River. We saw the Hradczany Castle, situated across the river, on a high hill — but only from the outside. They told us that it was closed for the day. Later we found out that on that particular day, in a communist putsch, they had thrown the foreign minister out of the window and declared to the world that he had committed suicide. The foreign minister was Massaryk, the son of the founder of the republic.
We spent the few days in Prague enjoying this historic city, with its unusual sights from the Middle Ages, including the oldest synagogue in Europe, called the Alt-Neu (Old-New) Synagogue, with the cemetery in back of the house of worship. The legend of the Golem of Prague originated from there. Rabbi Loew, known in Jewish scholarship as Rabbi Judah, the Maharal, wrote a famous commentary to Rashi. Among the legends told about him is the creation of the Golem, who on instruction from the rabbi saved the Jewish community from persecution. As soon as the Golem had fulfilled his mission, the rabbi returned him to his lifeless state. I went to this house of worship on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Since few Czech Jews had survived, the crowd was made up of remnants from the survivors of different Jewish communities. The books, the torahs, the cemetery — everything at that time was in complete disarray. It was the most moving experience that I ever had in a synagogue.
I also saw and admired the square where Huss was burned at the stake. He was the Czech reformer who wanted to translate the Bible into the national language and was burned to death by the prevailing Catholics, who judged him as a heretic. The old, historic town fascinated me no end. The medieval houses, with fortress-like portals; the water wells in the courtyards; the crossover walks from one side of the street to the other, at the third or fourth floor level for escape, in case of attack; the walls around the area. It all brought the history of the city alive; it brought the Middle Ages alive.
Besides, Prague is famous for its many churches with gold-leaf covered domes. In the sunshine, Prague is golden. I fell in love forever.
At the end of the five-day stay, the entire group boarded a train for Paris. My parents had managed to acquire the necessary visas to enable them to go to Paris earlier that year. They knew the time of my arrival, but they could not travel to meet me because of Father’s illness — he had recently been diagnosed with cancer. An old gentleman, a former neighbor of ours, awaited me at the station. I remembered this Mr. Nachman well. On December 7, 1941, his daughter, a former classmate of mine, jumped to her death from a fifth-floor window; the father picked up her body, carried it in, and laid it on my bed. (The next day we heard of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.) By now he was already an old hand at getting around in Paris; four months of residence had made him an old-timer. Well, he said that he loved the city, he regretted having come here so late in life.
The reunion was very emotional; Father's appearance was changed. He looked drawn, pale; his voice weak, his eyes lusterless. Yet, my parents hoped that a resolution of their hardships was in sight. They wanted to show me off to Dr. Falk and his wife, two wonderful, helpful people. Dr. Falk had diagnosed my father's stomach cancer and wrote to me in Bucharest, informing me that someone had to come to help my parents prepare to leave for the U.S. The next day I went to the Rothschild hospital to visit Dorzia, a friend with whom I had shared an apartment in Bucharest. She had left for Paris before me and resided there with her married sister. The recurrence of pleurisy forced her into the hospital. Since the Metro in Paris works like a dream, it took me no time to be able to commute.
A funny little incident happened on my way to the hospital. It was the day before Yom Kippur. Mr. Nachman visited my parents and when he saw me about to leave, he bade a hasty good-bye and left with me. After about three stops on the metro he had to change trains. Just before leaving, he embraced me and kissed me on the cheek, which he would never do otherwise. Only after he had left did I realize why he was sorry not to have come to Paris fifty years sooner. So many couples were kissing on trains and he had missed all this enjoyment, all this life. At least, this time he kissed a girl on the metro; he took advantage of the opportunity, at least this once.
The refugees in the hotel were of different ages, from different countries, intending to travel to different destinations, with different conceptions of how they were going to build a future. Basically, they had in common their homelessness, their rootlessness, their great losses of family, friends, homes. Because of the language barrier they could not communicate with the people around them, only with each other. Some had been waiting for months, others would be waiting for years for a visa to Canada or Australia or New Zealand or Chile. They were hounded by the French police when their transit visas expired and had to be renewed again and again. In the meantime, people's passports were expiring and becoming invalid, and they remained stateless — in possession of nothing more than a piece of paper with name, address, age, and country of origin.
Coming back to my parents and their plight: After a long conversation and clearing up what the stumbling block was, next day I went with Mother to the American consulate on the Place de la Concorde. It was a palatial building, with many people working at reception and information desks — all civilians. As we were sitting there, I noticed a young man in uniform coming and going, talking to the American personnel. I had the impression that the man was Jewish. When he came out again, I approached him and asked him whether I could ask him for some advice. I told him that I was in possession of an American student visa, but that my parents desperately needed tickets on one of the ships, the Queen Mary or the Queen Elizabeth, in order to get their preferential visas. He introduced himself as Mr. Ungar and thus the contact was established. He gave me his telephone number and asked me to make an appointment to see him in the Hotel Republique, on the Place de la Republique. He assured me that in case he was not there, his wife would make the appointment; she spoke Yiddish.
I came to his hotel the following day and everything became clear. For double the price of a ticket from Southampton to New York, we could get tickets on one or the other ship. Of course, it had to be paid in New York to his brother in Williamsburgh, a section inhabited by Orthodox Jews. We wrote to New York and waited for him to get a signal from his family that double the normal amount of money had been paid for three tickets. It took about ten days for him to receive the proper letter; we got tickets for my parents on the Queen Mary for the first week in October and for myself, on the Queen Elizabeth, one week later.
As soon as the consulate saw an approval for passage by ship, they issued my parents their visas. I wanted to leave one week later because of potential problems with the immigration authorities. Had they noticed, upon our arrival in New York, that my parents came as immigrants and I as a student, they may have made great difficulties. I didn't realize at the time that I would encounter complications on my arrival anyway.
Before I left Bucharest, I had promised Evi, with whom I had become friends in the Hungarian capital, that if I could find some connection to get her a visa to a South or Central American country, I would let her uncle in Paris know about it. When I met Mr. Ungar, I realized that he could get anything in Paris, for a price. I talked to him about it and he got a visa for Evi, paid for by her uncle in Paris. Such a visa was good as a basis to receive a passport in Romania, an exit visa, and a French transit visa. Evi got her paper, arrived in Paris, and lived at her uncle's for several years, before going to Mexico and eventually to her father in New York.
When Dori Scharf — another Bucharest friend, the uncle of a girl I had tutored—found out through friends in Romania that I was in Paris, he went there from Milan. By the time he arrived, they told him in HIAS that I had left for the U.S. He settled later in Brazil, where he lived for twenty years. He resides now in Israel.
After my parents left, I spent one more week in Paris. The Falks took me out one evening to a restaurant to see a new American movie, "The Best Years of Our Lives," a top film about World War II. Dr. Falk's cousin, Mr. Stark, had come to Paris soon after my arrival. He had fallen in love with me and wrote me silly cards from Lille. He even came to Paris to see me off and accompanied me all the way to Southampton. He really spoiled that trip for me. He was well intentioned, but a terrible bore. Besides, he argued with everybody on the train ride from Paris to Calais. Whenever someone opened a window, he wanted it closed. No matter what the others thought, things had to be done his way, a real pain.
Mr. Ungar had bought a ticket for another woman, who spoke only Polish and Yiddish. She had a son in New York and she was going to marry a rabbi in Williamsburg. He asked me to be her companion; he put her under my protection, since she could not communicate with anybody on the train or on the ship. We slept one night in London, then took the boat-train to Southampton, to embark on the Queen Elizabeth.
The trip from Paris to Calais was uneventful, except that I could see the utter devastation of the region North of Paris, the area of fierce battles after the landing of the Allies in Normandy: the rubble in Boulogne, the wrecks of planes and trains strewn all over, battlefields not yet cleared. I had seen similar devastation on my train trip through Germany a month before. The train had stopped in Nuremberg. All you could see then were bombed-out buildings and shacks covered with cardboard roofs.
The short passage by boat from Calais to Dover was stormy, the boat was rolling and shaking and I felt seasick. Yet the white cliffs of Dover were clearly visible on that sunny, windy October afternoon. The queasy feeling on that short trip was a harbinger of things to come, of a week of stormy weather on the Atlantic.
As for my impressions of Paris, I spent three weeks there, and not primarily as a tourist. There were important matters to take care of, there was a mission to fulfill. Lucky for my parents and myself, it was accomplished successfully, but with great anxiety. I spent one week alone in the Hotel Maillot, after my parents' departure to New York, in the room where my parents had spent four months.
I went to see the Louvre — a unique experience — and Versailles. The palace was completely empty since the French had hidden all the treasures during the war. The palace itself and the gardens were grandiose, but there were no flowers in bloom, no fountains in action. I went to see the tomb of Napoleon, in the Dome des Invalides. It was the day of the week when the building was closed.
I went to see the places that my high-school French teacher, Miss Grunspan, had described.
Coming out of Bucharest, Prague was on the same scale, by size, manageable to walk around and see the Old City, its grandeur and history. Prague was also a revelation, since I did not know what to expect. It surprised and enchanted me, for I had not foreseen such beauty, such panoramas along the Moldau River, the Castle on the hill, the bridges with statuary on them.
Paris, a much larger metropolis, on a different scale from the cities I had seen before, was overwhelming. Nevertheless, I could easily make myself understood and I recognized many streets and buildings and squares from my high-school studies. It felt somehow as if I had seen it once, long ago.
The look of the people, their uninhibited behavior, their open expressions of tenderness — that I saw for the first time in my life. While in Romania, where I grew up, people flirted and loved just like any place else in the world, yet they were very discreet. Kissing and hugging occurred only in complete privacy, expressions of tenderness were only hinted at — but in Paris people kissed wherever one looked: in the streets, in the Metro, under street lights. People stopped you in the street if you were walking alone and started flirting, talking — in a non-threatening way, to be sure. It seemed like the most natural thing to do. As I went alone to the consulate, to visit Dorzia, to see Dr. Falk, to see Evi's uncle, and to Mr. Ungar, I was traveling and walking all over the city. At first I did not know how to handle people who started talking to me. Then I decided to answer only in English — I don't understand French. One young man started up a conversation, as I was walking down Champs Elysee, in the morning, at about 10 a.m. When I motioned that I didn't understand and continued walking, he tried to express himself, like a mime and said: flirt, flirt. The French have love on their mind from the moment they get up in the morning. We grew up so repressed, while they expressed themselves so openly and innocently. That was a revelation.
Another revelation was the way we got our tickets. It showed me that corruption was everywhere. How Ungar divided up the sum of money with the people from the Cunard Line, a British company, I don't know. Yet without the graft, things did not move, no way. It taught me that the Romanians were not alone in accepting "baksheesh" (bribes). They did the same in the West, with a vengeance. That corruption bothered me, too.
Later, my brothers told me that when they came to the man in Williamsburgh, to pay double for the tickets, he would not give them a receipt. He said that this transaction works "on trust." It cost $1,500 instead of $750, and that was a lot of money to give to someone in 1947, without being sure that it was not being handed over to a swindler. Yet my brothers paid, they knew that it was imperative for my parents to leave. The man gave the signal, the tickets became available.
The sadness when meeting my ailing Father and distressed Mother threw a pall over everything upon my arrival in Paris. If one of their sons had come to Paris in July and found a way to arrange their trip to America sooner, perhaps he could have been saved; perhaps Father's life could have been prolonged; perhaps their lonesomeness could have been eased. One could see that Father was dying. In that situation, I could not really enjoy Paris. Besides, going to America was an unknown for me. At Columbia University, the semester had already started in the first week of September, and here I was, in the middle of October. I arrived in New York on October 17, 1947.
Crossing the Atlantic took one week. Most of the passengers were Americans of English, Irish, or Scottish descent, who had visited their families in the old country for the first time after the war.
The food on the ship consisted mostly of fish, all kinds of seafood that I had never eaten before, that I knew only from reading and from dictionaries. Whether it was turbot or cod or hake or even salmon—everything was boiled and tasteless. To make matters worse, the ocean turned very stormy and I could hardly eat at all. My roommate, the future "rebbetzin," was so seasick she feared to get out of her bunk.
The passengers could not place me, that is, where I came from. I spoke English, but differently from the Americans or the English. They found it hard to believe that anybody coming from the Balkans would speak English.
The night before our arrival, the storm was so severe that the ship anchored in the middle of the night and practically everybody came out of the cabins because of the commotion. Since it stopped for a few hours, we did not arrive with the tide in the morning, but twelve hours later, in the evening. It was the first time that the Queen Elizabeth came in twelve hours late. That was the headline in all the New York newspapers.
Everybody was excited, full of a combination of expectation and trepidation. We saw the Statue of Liberty, from afar — an impressive sight. The woman who was traveling with me had not seen her son in years, had lost her husband during the war, and was going to meet her intended new mate. After so many years I was going to see my siblings, all of whom had long been in America. When Eli left, I was five. Betty and Bernie saw me last when I was ten, Gertie when I was fourteen, and Sali had left home ten years previously. I was twenty-seven years old but had gone through troubles that could count for a hundred. Of course, there were uncles and aunts, in- laws, nieces and nephews, cousins.
The arrival turned out to be as complicated as everything that had preceded that event. Only my parents remained in the Bronx, where they had been staying with Bernie and his wife, Connie, since their arrival the week before. Father was too sick to travel; everybody else waited at the pier. When all had left the ship I remained on board — the only passenger out of 2,000 not to be allowed to disembark.
My family was told about difficulties with my documents. Somebody should come to the ship next day at ten, when immigration would take me to Ellis Island. The reason for not admitting me was my Romanian passport. It was valid for only another three months. Romania had turned communist lately and the immigration officials did not know how to proceed. They told me that, at that point, a passport had to be renewed or extended for another year, otherwise I would have to return on this same ship, back to Europe.
The ship, which was so elegant and animated when in use, looked like a death boat that night. The crew removed all bedding, all the tablecloths and dishes, glasses and silver. It was dark and quiet and enormous; you heard some creaking noises at night.
The next morning at 10 a.m. an official from immigration called for me to come down the gang plank. I looked around to see whether anybody from my family was there. I recognized my brother Bernie. When he saw me walk down, he approached us. I asked Bernie whether he had a car. When he affirmed that he did, I asked the immigration officer whether he would mind going with me to the Romanian consulate, for I was sure that they would renew my passport right away; if not, he could then take me to Ellis Island. I made a sign to Bernie not to say anything. First the officer was surprised that a newcomer could speak English, then he agreed that it was a logical step to take. Bernie looked up the address of the consulate, then he drove there, and I, flanked by an immigration official and my brother, asked the Romanian officials to extend my passport, which they did, right on the spot, for six months.
We said good-bye to the immigration official and there I was, with my brother, in his car, going to the Bronx. Bernie called Connie to tell her that we were finally on the way home. There was no big reception for me as expected the day before, everything was complicated, as usual. However, in the long run, things worked out.