A Child Al Confino: The True Story of a Jewish Boy and His Mother in Mussolini's Italy (6 page)

Because of my parents' Polish citizenship, we were allowed to leave Vienna but were permitted only two suitcases and very little money.

“Would you believe that they let us take out only two hundred
Schilling
per person? That would be enough to live one week. We weren't permitted to take our valuables or any of my jewelry,” Mother said to an acquaintance.

At that time, the son of a wealthy Turkish merchant who was studying medicine in Vienna had taken up residence at our hotel. My father sent a letter to him and, luck being on our side, the young student received our plea for help. Through his parents, who lived in Turkey, my father bartered Italian lire for hotel lodging. Thus we received needed funds in Italy, and the Turkish student received paid accommodations at the Hotel Continental.

With the help of the same student, who passed through Milan once or twice, Mother was able to retrieve much of her cherished jewelry. She sold pieces one by one to help us survive in our new country. Parting with a ring or bracelet or earrings caused great tension between my parents, making me realize how much these objects meant to my mother.

In a short time, my life in Milan became almost normal, perhaps too normal. Within two weeks after our arrival, my parents enrolled me in the Hebrew school.

“Why do I need scholastic discipline?” I complained. “Why can't you leave well enough alone? Do I bother anyone?”

The school provided bus transportation. In Vienna I had had to walk. The bus came for me first, then, after crisscrossing the width and length of the whole city, it stopped to pick up the last child just across the street from where I had been standing an hour earlier. The same tedious route was repeated on the way home, keeping me a school hostage two hours longer than necessary. I asked the driver to let me off on the corner, which would have saved me one hour, but the answer was “no.” I was convinced my mother had a hand in arranging the schedule. This was a devilish way for my parents to keep me away from them. Only the constant display of their affection convinced me otherwise.

The scholastic year ended two months after my enrollment and the lengthy bus rides were soon forgotten. But worse than those daily trips was adjusting to Milan's weather. The fog and humidity that greeted us on our arrival were a daily occurrence. Occasionally the fog lifted but only to make room for a heavy rainfall to make sure we would not miss the humidity. The weather was bad in winter and, as we soon found out, no better in summer.

“I can't believe a city with such lousy weather has attracted so many famous people,” Mamma remarked.

“And to think it is Italy's largest city,” Papa said.

We arrived in Milan on March 19. Winter was almost over, and yet, because the apartment did not have central heating, every night Papa had to load hot embers into a brazier, which he placed between the covers to dry the damp sheets.

We did have a short, but much too short, period of pleasant spring weather. Lying in a valley, surrounded by mountains, Milan had an oppressive and brutal summer. Almost every night my parents awakened me to take a walk to a city park, the beautiful Sforzesco Castle. There we could catch some breathable air. The idea was not original; thousands of the city's one million citizens did the same. The event, in fact, was so popular that the city authorities provided fireworks, imparting a festive mood to these nightly outings.

We stayed in Milan eight months, during which I enjoyed many firsts. Seeing an opera was one. My mother often spoke about her experiences at the Vienna opera when she was a young girl. She had heard the best of that era: Lotte Lehman, Jan Kiepura, Richard Tauber, Joseph Schmidt, Enrico Caruso.

“Do you realize,”
Mutti
said, “except for Caruso, these were all Jewish artists? And Hitler calls Jewish artists degenerate.”

She described the times when she had followed Jan Kiepura from the opera house back to his hotel, then waited with a crowd of hundreds for the singer to appear on the balcony and serenade his fans below. Or when, one winter, she stood all night for the ticket window to open in the morning. She had wanted a standing-room ticket to hear the great Caruso.

Through her vivid memories I relived the glorious moments of Vienna's past. Because she spoke with so much passion, I was able to feel the emotions she had felt many years before. Perhaps it was only how she remembered things, but I didn't care. Her stories gave me a great thirst to see an opera for myself. I was filled with curiosity.

“Did you ever meet any of these artists?” I asked.

“
Nein, mein Hasele
.”

Oh, how I loved the many terms of endearment my
Mutti
used for me, like
Hasele, Schatzele, Katzele, Puppale, Tatale, Stück Gold,
sometimes adding more schmaltz by prefacing them with
goldenes
.

One day after lunch, Mother said, “You take a nap and I'll have a big surprise for you.”

“What surprise?” I asked.

“We'll take you to La Scala. Only if you take a nap.”

I had heard of the famous opera house and decided that going to La Scala to see an opera was worth a nap, perhaps even two. That night, at the age of eight, dressed in my best Lord Fauntleroy suit, knee-high socks, and a black velvet ascot, I entered the portal of the greatest opera house in the world to hear
Turandot
. The red velvet parapets and overstuffed chairs, the gilded wall decorations, the huge crystal chandeliers, men and women in their flashy evening clothes, all made a lasting impact, putting me in a state of total ecstasy.

For days I told everyone I met of having been at La Scala, little realizing that, for those living in Milan, this was nothing unusual.

Another first was learning true woodworking. When I was five years old and still living in Vienna, with a small coping saw and a piece of thin plywood, I created a complete bedroom set that fit into a shoebox. But that had been child's play. In Milan I befriended a real cabinetmaker. Passing by his shop one morning, I stopped to watch. Cautiously, I moved into the sawdust-filled shop. The man stopped what he was doing and, shining a broad smile, greeted me and asked me something.

We had been in Italy less than two months and my Italian was not good enough to understand the question. In the best way I knew how, I asked the man to repeat what he had said. It took a few minutes and a great deal of the man's patience before I understood that he had asked me if I liked woodworking. I then tried to explain to him what I had done at age five, but only when I drew pictures to explain did he finally understand me.

This cabinetmaker did not work with coping saws and shoeboxes. He made full-sized furniture with full-sized tools. I was impressed by the large and deafening electric saw. As I prepared to leave his shop that first day, his arm around my shoulders and his warm squeeze made me realize I would be welcome back. His shop was just around the corner from where we lived and that made it easy to hop over any day I had time.

During that same period I became the little darling of some of the salesladies of the local Upim store located on Via Meravigli. What a perfect combination. The cabinetmaker supplied me with scraps of lumber, and the sales clerks were generous in letting me have batteries, lamps, wires, and everything else I needed to build my small projects.

So while most other kids played in the streets or the courtyards, I was in our room sawing, hammering, running wires, and building things. Despite the mess I created in our bedroom, my mother was proud of the scaled-down trolley car her little son had built — a copy of the real thing running through city streets. It had a seat for the conductor, two rotating controls (one the accelerator, the other the brake), a working headlight, and a bell.

I realized at an early age that my mother was a great socializer, and soon after we settled down in our new country, she made a great number of new friends. They must all have been refugees like us, for I never heard anything but German and Polish spoken. Mother had friends for bridge, others for sitting with at a coffeehouse, and others with whom she spent pleasant hours at home. Every time one of these friends came to visit, Mamma would ask me to sit in the trolley and show off my creation. She made it a ritual. They never stopped coming, and so biased was my
Mutti
that she failed to recognize what even I could see: her friends had little interest in her son's handiwork.

In going through my father's night table one day, I found a pair of glasses. With the find held high in my hand, I bolted out of the room in search of Mother. “Whose glasses are these?” I called out.

“They're Papa's,” she answered.

“I've never seen him wear them,” I said, stunned.

With her words still ringing in my ears, I dragged myself back to our room and broke into uncontrollable sobs. To me, only old people wore glasses and I didn't want my parents to get old.

My father was an impeccably elegant man. His tailor-made double-breasted suits, the white handkerchief folded into a perfect rectangle peeking from his breast pocket, and the knotted, thin-striped tie centered between the starched white collar were his personal trademarks. His hair, too, combed straight back without a part, was always perfect, thanks to the net he positioned with meticulous care before going to bed at night. He wore wing-tipped black shoes shined to a luster that, together with the squeaking soles, made them seem new.

Five feet ten inches tall, my father maintained his slim figure by devoting ten minutes each morning to his own version of gymnastic exercise. In boxer shorts, garters holding up the knee-high socks, his arms outstretched forward, he slowly bent his knees while his torso moved up and down a dozen or so times. On occasion, crouching next to Papa, I tried to imitate him.

The Giglis treated their cat and dog like children. Mrs. Gigli cooked special food for them, bathed them regularly, and each pet had a pillow at the feet on her bed. During our stay, the poor cat had to be put to sleep. It was a sad moment for everyone when we watched Mr. Gigli take the cat on its final trip to the veterinary.

I had adjusted to the cat's being gone when a few days later, to my consternation, Rina brought the stuffed animal home. She placed it on the living room mantlepiece where it sat taunting the dog by refusing to play with his old friend. Whenever my parents sat in the living room, they whispered about the dead cat sitting on the mantlepiece. “
Takke meshuge
!”
Mutti
remarked. Really crazy. One Sunday morning we were gathered in the living room with our landlords when the subject of religion came up.

“You don't go to church, Signora Lotte. Are you not Catholic?” Rina asked.

“No. We are Jewish.”

“Jewish!” Rina shrieked. “
O, Madonna mia!
I would never have guessed. But you don't look Jewish.”

My mother was bewildered by Rina's statement. “How does a Jew look?” she asked.

“Well, I thought….”

Mutti
was clearly impatient now. “You thought what?”

“I thought all Jews … had horns.”

Both my parents burst into loud laughter. The subject never surfaced again, nor did Rina or her husband show any difference in their warm feelings toward us.

That year my mother came up with a great idea. She arranged for me to go to a summer camp in Switzerland. The camp had been organized and financed by a group of good-hearted Swiss ladies who had raised the necessary money to offer a slice of happiness to Jewish refugee children by selling home-baked goods on the streets of Zurich, Basel, and Geneva. I had turned eight, and the thought of my being allowed to travel to another country, away from my parents' strict discipline, was so exciting I could hardly sleep. “How many more days?” I kept asking.

Two days before the long-anticipated departure, Papa took me for a haircut. As we were walking down the stairs, Mamma shouted, “Short, I want him to be cool!”

A little with sign language and less in his poor Italian, my father tried to communicate with the barber. The man tapped my father's arm and indicated that he understood perfectly and proceeded to shave off my hair completely. Back home, at the sight of my bald head, Mother's eyes opened wide and from the lack of color in her face, I was sure she was about to faint. That haircut caused a long argument between my parents and, for most of the summer, it gave my camp playmates a reason to taunt me.

The day finally came when we all went to the train station for my trip to Basel. Embarking on my first real adventure alone put me beyond exhilaration. I wanted my mother to stop hugging me, so certain that each hug was delaying the train's departure. My father had already placed the suitcase on the luggage rack and was waiting to get me settled in the third-class compartment.

“I hope you have a very good time and I hope and pray that you will behave,” said Papa as he placed his arms around me, lifted me off the floor, and covered my face with kisses. My father had kissed me many times before but never so many times. He stepped off just as the conductor whistled and the doors slammed shut. At the window I waved a final goodbye and, exhausted, fell into my seat.

The metal wheels squeaked. The excitement and anticipation that had caused me to pester my mother endlessly, turned into panic. I was alone in that large compartment built for eight, on a train going to an unknown city in some foreign country. I hated that stupid piece of cardboard hanging from my neck holding the documents. No one else ever wore anything like it. Maybe it was best nobody was in the cabin to see it. But thanks to the “necklace,” I received extra attention from the Swiss border guards who had boarded the train and I didn't have to show my passport with that ugly photo.

“I will help you when we arrive,” the conductor said. Good to his word, on arrival he guided me to an awaiting counselor.

The two months I spent in the Swiss chalet, nestled in a dense forest, surrounded by flowers and a variety of wild animals, was a delightful period. I enjoyed long walks through the woods, learned handicrafts, and made many new friends. Most of the children were from Austria and Germany, so language did not present a problem. The food was plentiful and delicious, and I was introduced to a variety of new dishes, such as venison and hare, which were served at least once a week and became my favorites.