A Child Al Confino: The True Story of a Jewish Boy and His Mother in Mussolini's Italy (46 page)

We heard that Paula Alster had joined one of her brothers in Milan and later moved to Chile. The Michelagnoli family settled in Venice, where Alfredo found a position as a reporter for a local newspaper. Gaby Perutz married Cesare Meneghini, her Italian aviator, while Giorgio Kleinerman enlisted in the Polish brigade attached to the British Eighth Army. He saw heavy fighting up the Italian boot and with luck came through unscathed.

One by one we found several of the other internees. Clara Gattegno eventually emigrated to Palestine before I had an opportunity to see her. Through her uncle, Beppe Gattegno, whom we had befriended, we learned that she married there and, against her physician's advice, became pregnant, causing her untimely death.

Eric with his mother and stepfather in the public gardens on Via Caracciolo in Naples in 1945.

Gusti Kampler met an American soldier who was born in the same German town and with whom she had gone to grammar school. They fell in love and were married in 1945 in Naples with many of the internees and some friends from Ospedaletto attending.

From my papa I learned what happened to his two brothers and his parents. There was an unconfirmed report from a neighbor that my loving
Opapa
, my grandfather, had been shot on the street and left to die in front of his home in Lwow. My dear grandmother succumbed in a Nazi extermination camp. My father's two brothers, one cousin (who was hidden by a Christian friend in her closet in the basement), and Uncle Maximilian's immediate family were my only relatives to survive the Holocaust. None of the other eighty members did.

Papa also told me how, that first week in September of 1939, after the German army had overrun Poland, he and his two brothers fled on foot in different directions. Uncle Norman, wearing two suits and two heavy overcoats, proceeded south. Years later he told me how he walked through Rumania, the Balkans, Turkey, and Syria before reaching Palestine. From there, in 1942, at the height of the war, he boarded an American cargo ship to join his wife, Sally, in New York. There he practiced medicine until his death in 1987. They had one daughter, Ettie.

At the end of the war my father was able to leave the Siberian camp. Partially on foot he returned to Vienna from where he took the train to meet with me. His brother Oswald, my Uncle Osi, showed up in Palestine. In 1950, Uncle Osi traveled to Vancouver to seek the woman he had married before the war. (He had not followed her to Canada at that time.) She had obtained an annulment, remarried, and given birth to two children. Heartbroken, he returned to Israel for a short time where he shared an apartment with my father. Osi eventually returned to Vienna, where he remarried years later. Although he never recovered from the war years nor from the breakup of his first marriage, he lived a productive life, becoming president of an insurance company and head of the Vienna Jewish Community until his death in 1979.

Eric with his mother, stepfather, and others in the public gardens on Via Caracciolo in Naples in 1945.

Soon after our reunion at the lonely rail terminal, my father emigrated to Israel. In Tel Aviv he encountered the woman to whom he had been engaged in Vienna before he met my mother. They took up the relationship they had broken up some twenty years earlier and spent the rest of their lives together. I stayed in regular contact with my father and shared a short telephone call to him each month until his death on December 4, 1975, at the age of seventy-eight.

Five months before my father's death, fate smiled upon us for a wink of time. Papa's heart had failed but rapid intervention at the hospital in Tel Aviv brought him back to life, giving me the chance to fly to Israel and see him one final time since our sad meeting at the Prato railroad station twenty-nine years earlier.

Ettore Costa went back to Rome where he had lived before his years of internment. He no longer wrote, but devoted his talent to painting. Already blind in one eye and with less than 10 percent vision in the other, he astounded Roman art critics by creating some of his best oil paintings. He became known as the “Blind Painter” and a book was written about him. I greatly treasure my copy as well as the one original oil painting in my possession.

A twenty-five-year difference existed between me and this exuberant, fascinating, intellectual man, who honored me with his friendship for more than two decades. Ettore and I kept in touch through the years following the war. I visited him several times in Rome, where he delighted in playing Cicerone and showing me the magnificence of the Eternal City. From the intimate chapels to the grandiose monuments, never has there been a better guide — not in Rome, not anywhere. After I settled in the United States, we corresponded often. He expressed a desire to visit me and meet my family. In a letter dated February 15, 1965, he categorically stated that “nothing will interfere from my coming to New York in June.” Nothing except death, which snatched him on a street in Rome in April of that year. He was not yet sixty.

After the war, I visited Vienna several times. Each time I struggled to find that small flat near the Prater where my dear
Omama
had lived. She was among my dearest and most beloved relatives. I revisited many landmarks in my native city but the name of the street where Grandma had lived kept escaping me. After Uncle Osi's death, his wife handed me two envelopes. They contained a picture of
Opapa
, my grandfather in Poland, and some documents, one of which was my parents' marriage certificate, listing my grandmother's Vienna address. My wife and I hurried across town, asked a stranger for directions and soon, breathless, found ourselves before the large, old entrance of 6 Ybbs Strasse. My heart was pounding. My eyes were glazed. I tried to read the tablet over the portal. “This building was destroyed by Allied bombing and rebuilt in 1946,” I translated to my American wife.

I had no interest in visiting a rebuilt edifice and, giving full freedom to the tears that had swelled my eyes, we left the site.

My wife and I were back at 6 Ybbs Strasse the following year. The intensity of my emotions of the previous year now quieted, I reread the tablet. The building had been “damaged” and not destroyed, the inscription read. Without hesitation, I pushed open the smaller door inside the heavy portal, crossed the metal threshold and entered the poorly lit ground-floor foyer. I found the caretaker's flat. A young woman answered my knock.

“Is there anyone who has lived here since before the war?” I asked.

In a marked Viennese dialect and without catching her breath, she replied, “Oh yes, apartment number nine.”

My wife close behind, I ran up the circular staircase. The apartment was on the third floor, at the end of the hallway, where the little water fountain, built into the wall around the corner from the landing, awoke old memories. I knocked on the door.

An old woman unlocked her door. Three chains stopped it from opening more than a fraction. “Would you remember where a Frau Brandwein lived before the war?” I asked.

“She lived right here,” she replied, without a moment's hesitation, then removed the three chains and invited us in.

Oh yes! This was
Omama
's place. I recognized the cupboard where she kept my prune jam, the tiny kitchen, the bedroom where I had taken many naps. Only my dear
Omama
was missing. We stayed to talk a while. I was aware of what the Nazis had done with Jewish homes and properties. This woman had taken over what once had belonged to
Omama
, yet I could not find hate or resentment for her.

Whenever I go to Vienna, I pass by 6 Ybbs Strasse. Perhaps
Omama
knows I am visiting her.

Jimmy Howell and I have gotten together on many occasions and have been in regular telephone contact for many years.

After almost fifty years, I was successful in finding Giorgio (now George) Kleinerman and Davide (now David) Kampler. I have spent some memorable days with both, looking back at the times spent in Ospedaletto d'Alpinolo and remembering many of the other
confinati
. Sadly, George Kleinerman passed away in July 2004.

Gusti Kampler, who married the American soldier she knew from kindergarten, lives alone in California, having lost her husband shortly after their golden anniversary.

After much searching, I located one of the Perutz daughters, Ciocca. She was not well. I spoke to her several times but never got to see her. She told me about her family. Her parents were dead as were her sister who passed on very young and her husband. Ciocca had an emergency surgery in 2008 and died on the operating table.

Eric and Eric's wife Cookie (Judith), the first one on the left, with Giorgio Kleinerman and his wife at their fiftieth anniversary reunion, 1997.

In March 2008, I was summoned to Ospedaletto d'Alpinolo by the town's mayor. With great fanfare and celebration, I was awarded the town's honorary citizenship. Much has changed in that backward village. I visited the apartment we occupied during our stay. At that time there was no running water nor a toilet, except for the outhouse attached at the end of the corridor. This time we found a magnificent modern bathroom, including a bidet and gold-plated fixtures and in the various rooms, instead of a singular light bulb, I saw displayed gorgeous Murano chandeliers.

Every home that we visited had one or more modern bathrooms, central heat, washing machines, and lots of marbles.

Children now have an opportunity to attend the school of their choice, aided by the buses that come to the village to transport them to the provincial city of Avellino. Many are the college graduates I encountered during my visit and just about everyone seems to have completed high school.

During that stopover I also met the boy, a senior now, who back in 1943 had purchased my bicycle.

In April 2010, I was invited by the Austrian Federal Chancellery to spend one week in Vienna as their guest. It was a trip with mixed emotions: nostalgia, sadness, and gratification.

The manager of the Jewish Community's Registry was able to locate the records of my aunt, my mother's sister, whose name I was unable to recall. He searched through a number of old books and by matching witnesses on my parents' marriage certificate, he found my aunt's name, her marriage date, and the date of her divorce. From the record book, I learned her full name: Tauba Ruchel Schif, who I mentioned in this book as Aunt Stefi, the only named I recalled. He also furnished me with the gruesome details surrounding her deportation to Auschwitz on July 17, two days before her forty-ninth birthday.

After graduating high school in Naples in 1949 and after our emigration to the United States, my life followed a new trail quite diverse from what I would have experienced in Italy. My mother and I first settled in Philadelphia, while my step-dad followed a few months later. My first ambition was to study and become an opera singer. I took piano and voice lessons, but my mother, the eternal pragmatist, suggested I follow a career in popular music, ignoring that her son was more of a dreamer.

While devoting some time to studying music, I obtained work with an engineering firm and at the same time, enrolled at Drexel Institute of Technology to continue my academic studies. At the end of the first year, after realizing that work in an office was not suited for my personality, I dropped out of college and resigned from my job. I was supporting my mother at that time, and people thought I was insane to give up a job that paid $10,000 a year. That was in 1952, when the minimum wage was the great sum of 75 cents per hour and a $2,500 annual income was considered a living wage. I accepted a job as a salesman without guarantee of income but in less than a month, my earning equaled what I had recently given up.