Transcending Darkness: A Girl’s Journey Out of the Holocaust

24. Hof

W e left the shelter in Prague to continue on our journey to West Germany with the ultimate hope of reaching America. We had 180 more kilometers to travel by train and one more border to cross to reach the American zone. We had no reliable information about the West zone because the communist government slanted the news. The train carried us through remote places to an unknown destination. I wondered, How will I face the German people and how we will be treated there? Beyond that, I wondered , Will we ever find our American family? Will we ever reach that land? And what was America really like? I imagined places where prairies and mountains ran into an endless beyond, like in pictures I had seen in children’s cowboy movies long ago. I imagined New York City the way I had heard about it in songs and stories: a city of skyscrapers that blocked the heaven and dissected the earth into a maze of narrow canyons. When we neared the border crossing and Russian soldiers stomped into the train to check documents, I went stiff with fear. I swallowed my breath, clutched my forged birth certificate tightly in my clammy palm and concentrated on not saying anything that might betray us. 24 Hof Liberation 154 Was it a gloomy fall afternoon when we crossed into the western sector of Germany, or was it my worries that hung like a gray mist over the rust-tinged landscape? The sight of armed Russian soldiers guarding the border added a precarious eeriness to the bucolic landscape. What lay ahead of us, beyond the lush green and persimmon-colored horizon, remained a mystery. What do we do now? Get off the train in Hof, a city close to the Russian border, or continue deeper into the western sector where we might be safer? We still could not believe our good fortune and remained concerned that we might never find security and true freedom . Too tired and too confused, we decided to look for a place to spend the night in Hof, and then decide what to do next. Hof, on the Saale River, a significant border checkpoint between the Soviet and the western sectors in 1945, is an old industrial city in picturesque Bavaria. It is a small city with simple houses and churches with pointed steeples. Thousands of German refugees expelled from territories reclaimed by Poland and Czechoslovakia, and those fleeing from other communist regions, poured into Hof. Some refugees stayed, others just passed through on the way to other destinations. All needed shelter. We found temporary housing at Der Weisse Hahn (The White Rooster), a hostel for refugees, located on the ground floor of a building near the center of the city. The hostel consisted of one large dormitory with a single large window, and about twenty-five wrought-iron beds lined in straight rows along two parallel walls. Our beds were near the entrance and directly across from a window. Max, David, and Fredka each had their own beds; I slept with Mama. A large family of Gypsies occupied a cluster of beds on the opposite far corner. The others were mostly German refugees. Every day new people came to replace those who left. We took our meals in a restaurant in the center of Hof, where most refugees ate. I looked forward to the meals at small tables and to meeting people. Local Jews, who stopped in to look for lost relatives and to greet newcomers, interested me most. I still remember Herr Müller, a short, plump man with round eyes who left the hostel every morning in a Tyrol hat, a cotton bag slung over his shoulder. He returned in the evening, often with wild flowers in his hand. He never missed saying, “Grüss Gott” (good day) and doffing his hat respectfully. He was German. The Nazi government put him into a concentration camp because he was “mentally inferior.” I remember him for his gentleness , innocence, and sadness, and for the wrong done to him. And I remember the Gypsies for their lightheartedness and for being less inhibited than the rest of us. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I was awakened by their laugh- Hof 155 ter and the unfamiliar sounds of lovemaking that came from a bed in their corner. To protect me from those sounds, Mama drew...