INTERRUPTED LIVES

My friend John Levy gave himself a birthday party for the fourth year in a row.

The party was held, as in previous years, in an excellent  well known restaurant.  About seventy people were invited - sixty came.  It was very festive - a sit down dinner at a lavishly decorated table.

It started with an abundance of hors d’oeuvres, an open bar - endless serving of expensive wines, a wide choice of great food, and delicious deserts.

David Morris, "Scotty," as in previous years was Master of Ceremonies.  He started with amusing jokes, told a number of very funny stories, and roasted the host, and some guests too.

I did not make my yearly speech.  I wanted others to have a chance to use the microphone.

I had the opportunity to observe the invited guests.  There were judges, lawyers, doctors, and stable business people – all friends of John.  They all seemingly enjoyed themselves, praised my friend, and obviously they all liked this form of celebration.

I also  observed that the majority of the guests were women.   Knowing John Levy  well for all these years, I was not surprised to see this group of attractive women of all ages.  He really concentrated his attention however, on sparkling and animated  young women.  Not just for sex alone as one would imagine, but also for companionship.   I know of several long luxury cruises that he took with young, sexy, vibrant young women. 

And why are most of the ladies not anxious to marry him?  John is wealthy, most presentable, of outstanding good humor, and an excellent companion.  And mostly, I wonder, why no Jewish women?

I mulled this over and over again.  And other men, some of my own very best friends are, or were, also of this same mold.

One very close and intimate friend was Charles Gottfried.  We were inseparable for fifty years.  We shared our fortunes, our lives, our thoughts, and our intimacies.

Charles, too, surrounded himself with a great number of young women.  He wanted to be loved and accepted for himself.  Charles never married anyone, and he never dated Jewish girls.  Why?

All at once, I realized that I had an answer; a disturbing answer.

John Levy comes from a stable, middle-class family.  He was born and raised in a nice good - sized town in Germany, right next to the Swiss border.  He normally, as a child, rode his bike between the two countries - even went to school in both countries.

He lived with his parents in a comfortable home.  They named him "Hans."  He had blond hair, and was liked by everyone.  Life was good.  And then came the beginning of the Nazis emergence - the terrible "Kristellnacht" in 1938.  He was detained as a Jew, but talked himself out of trouble - but the fear remained.

Soon his father’s bank deposits were frozen.  Hardships set in, and the German appetite for conquest came with the acquisition of the new territories - 1939 brought the invasion of Poland, and the start of World War II.

John is ordered by his parents to jump on his bike and cross the few blocks into Switzerland.  He obeys, and that is the last he ever sees of his parents.

A teenager alone.  From now on all is denial, conjecture, and forgetfulness.

John is on a boat, leaving for Bolivia.  He is all alone; a scared kid.  He finds a family also leaving for the same destination.  They take him in, and when they find a place to live, he stays with them.  Naturally they had a young pretty daughter of the same age.

Somehow he makes his way to the United States, and ends up, again all alone, in San Francisco.

He is ambitious, daring, works diligently, and becomes financially successful.  He has acquired security, has his own expensive condominium, buys new cars every few years, and has many girl friends.

No Jewish women - yet Mr. Levy remains very committed to his Jewish roots and traditions.

It was not until 1999 that I saw a German book published in John's birth city - not an apology for the "Jewish Solution" - but a list of the Hebrews taken by the Nazis - none of which are ever to be seen again.

There is John’s family, their home, a listing of their birthdays, and photographs of their last days in the city before they were taken away.

I see his parents, nice people, good Germans, his beautiful mother, a Dreifus; perhaps a relation to the French Dreifus family, who suffered the infamous anti-Semitic scandal brought on by the French military.

Suddenly the vision of Charles Gottfried pops into my mind.  This teenager, too, was plucked from his on own close family -  and as in so many similar situations,  never to see them again either.

At 16-17 this well educated, socially secure boy, was forced to leave his family nest in Holland because of the Nazi invasion of this peaceful country.  He escaped to England with the Royal Family and a few other people.

Charles soon smuggled himself back into his homeland.  He joined an underground group to fight back.  He was betrayed by one of the "patriots" who was seeking favors from the Nazis.

The whole group was caught, taken to an abandoned place, and after being severely beaten most of them were shot to death.

Charles was viciously beaten.  His back was broken. (All the rest of his life, he looked as if he were a hunchback.)  He was left for dead, but he did not perish.  When night came, he crawled for miles until he was rescued and protected by a farmer’s family.

He made his way back to England and joined a group that did intelligence work for the Allies.  As an agent he participated in operations and intelligence missions all over Europe.  He was detained and sent to prison, but he escaped, and caught up with the American forces.  He joined them, and eventually found his way to Amsterdam.  While in Amsterdam, he finds the group that tormented and deported his parents.  He takes terrible revenge.  Eventually he comes to the States and takes great financial risks in the business world.  He is successful in these ventures, and he too prospers.

I met Charles in San Francisco.  This dashing European was a polished gentleman.  He became well known in social and cultural circles.  Always in the latest model convertible - always with gorgeous well known young women, T.V. personalities, beautiful models, actresses - not one is Jewish!

Why?  I begin to see a pattern, and to search for a reason.  I remind myself of another friend, Dr. Jonas Katz, a popular psychoanalyst who once told me that his earliest recollections are of his mother - how warm and fragrant she was that day at the railroad station in Germany  where he and many more Jewish children were about to depart to England.

He described the train pulling away - the parents crying, and like so many, many others he was never to see them again.  Swallowed into the black hole; deceived by the people of what was then the most cultural country in the world.

Dr. Katz too, with his jet set way of life, the blond beauties, the search for respect and acceptance - still a bachelor, without any lasting commitments.

I recognize that he too falls in the same pattern.  How come all this comes to my mind, now at a party - a celebration of life?

And the face of "Gunther Zimmermann" comes into my mental vision also.  I see this tall, ramrod straight, young man walking his dog.  The dog is a large, black German police animal weighing about 115 pounds.  I noticed them for the first time some forty-five years ago.  I saw them in front of my home, and felt as if a Nazi Gestapo from some concentration camp had been plunked in front of my eyes.

I did not like him.

Later I found that this man lived around the corner from my house in a single family dwelling.  He drove, as my friend Gottfried did, a spectacular showpiece - a Cadillac convertible, inevitably  with an equally spectacular show-person at his side - usually a blond, or sometimes a redhead, or occasionally a dark haired woman.  Although Gottfried and Zimmermann never met, I am positive that they shared some of the very same women.

Once, when I was out in front of my home with the garage door open, Gunther and his dog passed by.  The walls in my garage are covered with some of my early paintings.  Gunther looked in, and began to read the Hebrew words that can be seen on some of my canvases.

Astonished, I inquired as to how he could read this text.

We started a conversation, and we talked, and are still talking after forty-five years.

His past was also fascinating.  As a teenager in Germany, his parents sent him out of the country.  He ended up in Shanghai alone, young, and scared.  He had to learn quickly how to survive.

The Japanese who occupied that part of China, after they took it away from the English, established a ghetto like area into which they packed about 125,000 Jews.

Gunther posed as a German, and escaped.  He lived in the Japanese areas, and began to learn how to deal in jewelry; mainly diamonds.

When the war ended he came to San Francisco, opened a jewelry store, and became quite successful, well known, and generally liked.

Later he retired, and as related above, we became good friends.  The big surprise came when I first entered his home.  It was a copy of a typical European Jewish home.

This German Aryan appearing man is actually an Orthodox Jew!  He keeps kosher.  On Friday nights, he lights the candles and bakes "challah."  He has a room full of holy Hebrew books, a parchment Torah in a secluded place, and paintings of famous rabbis.

In his retirement, he lives alone.  He was never married, and in his very private, quiet way, he is giving away some of his accumulated wealth to needy people.  Most of the recipients do not even know who the donor is.  He just recently paid for two ambulances for a hospital in Israel.

In one of my stories, not mentioning his name, I call this person "One of the 36 Just Men," as the Jewish lore tells us that these men hold up the sanity of the universe.

Gunther is seventy-five years old now, and is still living alone.  When I asked him why he never married, he gave me a straight answer.

I looked at the life of four of my good friends, and I can remember others like them as well.  All the ones that were uprooted as children, removed from their secure, warm homes, let them be the judges of how they should live.   The holocaust continues to extract its toll, and we can only hope that the world has learned a lesson or two. We must not forget. We must remind.

Of these four men only John was ever married.  She was a very young attractive model, but alas, this marriage soon ended in divorce.

John’s party lasted late into the night.  Everyone seemed to be happy.  We wished the celebrant luck, a long happy life, and expressed the hope that we would all celebrate our host’s birthday again next year.

We finally left, and John, a happy man, went home.