Free Crossing the Borders of Time by Leslie Maitland

Frau Loewy had rented rooms in the home of a Catholic butcher a few blocks away, a difficult choice for an Orthodox Jew who kept strictly kosher. She was not at the station, having said her good-byes a few days before, but there was Buhler the chauffeur. He had named his son Norbert in honor of the Günzburgers’ son and had continued working for Sigmar long past the time that having a Jewish employer made sense for a German. Now he clasped hands with his passenger of so many trips, neither one daring as their roads separated to voice his deep feelings. Before the coming war’s end, Buhler’s son Norbert, still a teenager, would sacrifice an arm for the Führer fighting in Russia—the field of Germany’s greatest casualties in World War II—while Sigmar’s Norbert would later be posted to Germany, a vengeful soldier in the victorious army of his new American homeland.
    Sigmar’s longtime secretary, Elisabeth Hipp, brought chocolates to sweeten the travelers’ journey. For the rest of his life, Sigmar would find occasions to send Fräulein Hipp money, and she, in turn, regularly sent back little German books of Christian devotional verse or evangelical tracts, as well as calendars with brightly colored botanical pictures labeled in both German and Latin. These my grandfather presented to me. I still have most of those books (never read) and calendars (never used) on my shelves even now, unable, of course, to find the right day after so many years to start throwing them out. When it comes to discarding these things of the past, I can never think of an answer that pleases my heart—the reason to get rid of them now instead of last week or eight months or twelve years ago—which is probably why everyone always gives them to me . A family Dumpster for memories’ traces. I hold on to them all—Sigmar’s cigar butt from the day that he died, Alice’s veil of black lace—as if I could use them to conjure their owners, to bring them back once again.
    Beyond that is my link in the chain of possession that has guarded not just these simple tokens of everyday life, but also the family pictures and papers and letters that have survived generations of turmoil to land at my door. I have become a trustee, a conduit, and to honor the past, I must pass them along, “keeping faith with those who sleep in the dust,” as the prayer book tells me. It is, I see clearly, much like the way I increasingly think of the Jewish tradition. In the face of the odds, the forces that time and again have sought to destroy it, the suffering of those who died to preserve it, who am I—who am I in these easy times for us here—to toss it aside, to abandon it now? From the beginning, the Jewish narrative has always been a story of journey, recalled and retold in each generation. Among those who have lived an exodus within their own times and have stubbornly carried their faith to new lands, it is left to their children to save and transmit it to those who come later, forging behind.
    The train that carried my mother’s family out of their ancestral home, a perilous five years after Hitler seized power, stopped at the border, where Reich officials examined their exit visas and verified they were each taking no more than 10 Reichsmarks (under $2.50) out of the country. The heart-stopping terror my mother remembers as the scrutiny continued for much longer than seemed necessary was so indelibly etched in her soul that I have watched her relive it time and again, whenever a situation requires producing identification. Going through customs, returning from any trip outside this country, is an encounter she fears—in part because it involves showing a passport that lists her real birthplace, and because it empowers an official to search and ask questions before granting her entry. “If a doorman looks at me hard,” she has confided, “I still get that feeling, my knees begin shaking.”
    She arrived in Mulhouse with her new French name. As a