Preface
In one’s crepuscular (now, that’s a word I’ve never used before) phase of life, writing memoirs seems mandatory. Actually, I wrote these some ten years ago, but I was already reaching old age then. My apologia pro labore mea relies on my belief that my first twenty or so years of life were a bit unusual, although far from unique—most of my fellow young escapees from Europe had similar journeys. But this is my story, the one I can best write about. These memoirs end at about the time I left Ecuador for the US. The rest of my tale is not uninteresting, but not as dissimilar from that of my colleagues and friends. Some day, if the spirit moves me and my joints permit it, I may write more. For now, this is what I want to share with you.
Elio Schaechter 2012
To my wife, Edith, and my children, Judy and John,
with love and admiration.
Timeline
1928 Born in Milan, Italy, only child of Victoria (Vicia) Wachsmann and
Abraham Isaac Schaechter
1940 (September) Left Italy
1941 (January) Arrived in Quito, Ecuador
1950 (January) Left Ecuador for the US
1954 Married Barbara Thompson
1961 Daughter Judith born in Gainesville, FL
1962 Settled in Boston, MA
1964 Son John born in Newton, MA
1988 Barbara died
1994 Married Edith Koppel (Wellisch)
1995 Moved to San Diego, CA
My thanks go to my collaborator, Merry Youle, for her help with this project.
Chapter 1: Body Type
Me, about 3 months old, with parents.
I was a lymphatic. My mother was told that a thin, spidery, pale eight-year-old like me couldn’t be anything else. At that time, in the mid-nineteen thirties, the belief in body types was as ingrained in Europe as it currently is in some quarters (although the Internet tells me that “lymphatic” nowadays denotes the opposite body type). At any rate, what you do for that condition is to feed the child prosciutto, a great cure for lymphaticism. Never mind that prosciutto is as unkosher as it gets, my mother favored my physical well-being to the spiritual. Fortunately, then, as now, I liked paper-thin prosciutto, with or without melon wedges. Notwithstanding, my mother kept a more or less kosher household. Ambivalence of this sort was typical of my parents, and was caused by a wavering between the Jewish traditions and the desire to assimilate into Western culture. They were not alone in this, as most of the Jews in Western countries were living through a similar process.
Me, 6 months old, in Milan’s Sforza
Castle (Castello Sforzesco).
My mother was a pretty poor cook, and, for a Jewish mother, had little interest in food. We always had a maid who doubled as nanny. The one I remember was from the country, as most of the servants tended to be. I have a photo of her and me in the courtyard of the Sforza Palace in Milan, showing that she was quite tall. She would sneak me into the church she attended (I assume, unbeknownst to my parents). I once managed to lose my teddy bear there, but, after a frantic search, she eventually found it in a confessional booth, conceivably absolved of his sins. Although the servant did most of the cooking, we ate a fair amount of Jewish food, which my mother must have made. An example is what my parents called "stuffed derma," which was made by taking the neck of a chicken (ugh!) and filling it with a dumpling-like stuffing containing, among other things, chopped hard-boiled eggs. The whole thing was boiled and cut across in slices. We ate lunch (our main meal) in the dining room. The tabletop sat on a large square pedestal and I discovered that I could reach a space between the underneath of the tabletop and the pedestal, which was handy for depositing food I didn’t like. I would just drop what to me was inedible, especially the derma, down into this shadowy space. This worked like a charm, but eventually there were lots of little flies, which prompted my father to discover the cache of rotten food inside the pedestal. I remember my surprise at not getting beaten.
Jewish tombstones in my father's shtetl (hometown),
Stari Sambor (then in Poland, now Staryi Sambir in
Ukraine). By permission from Eric Altenberg. Source.
My parents came from a typical Polish Jewish background, both from shtetls (small towns) in the Southern part of Poland, in Galicia. Their families would now be called Orthodox, although in the shtetls there was no other choice. I know little about my ancestors, other than some family myths about being related on my mother’s side to a whole string of important rabbis. In more recent times, that side of the family has done well. It includes at least one important Jewish historian (Arnold Wiznitzer), an Israeli general, my distinguished molecular biologist cousin Hanna Engelberg-Kulka, and others.
Jakob Wachsmann, maternal grandfather.
My maternal grandfather, Jakob Wachsmann, made a nice living in Vienna publishing books consisting of compound interest tables. I still have some of these books, but they don’t make for very good bedtime reading. Before there were calculators (leave alone computers), they were used to look up how much the interest was, say, on 1000 schilling after 7 1/2 months at 5.25% interest. I’m told that he conceived the idea while in jail in Poland for avoiding service in the Army. If so, he must have had enough time for the calculations. We visited Vienna a few times and I remember that my family lived in a fancy apartment house they owned near the grand-sounding shopping street, Mariahilfer Strasse (Mary’s Helper Street). I wish I knew what my grandfather had done in the shtetl and what got him into this obscure but profitable business. His son, my uncle, was said to have been a gifted engineer who published a couple of technical books (which I also still have). He did himself in, due to a broken heart, it is said.
Nanny and me.
For my father’s side, I have a sort-of-genealogy dating back to the 16th century. I do not place much trust in it because the descendants are not listed continuously. It was commissioned by a family member in the thirties while traveling in Poland and is full of adulatory references to famous scholars. Still, I would like to think that my family included illustrious rabbis, gaonim, and other kinds of notable scholars. Both families, paternal and maternal, left the villages because that region of Poland became a World War I battleground between the Austrians and the Russians. They surely didn’t need much of an excuse to leave that part of the world.
Me with mother and maternal grandmother.
My mother was largely the product of sophisticated Vienna. She had spent some twelve years there and had become thoroughly immersed in Central European culture. She spoke refined German without an accent and learned Hebrew at a Zionist institute, the Herzl Gymnasium. Her Hebrew pronunciation was exemplary, the sort spoken by the founders of modern Hebrew (but soon to be mutilated into the current usage). Her spoken Hebrew was so unusual that later on in Israel people would almost line up to hear such a pure version of that language. She served as the Hebrew teacher for the Jewish kids in Quito (where we later ended up), which is likely the reason why I never learned much of that language myself. My mother was quite liberal, both by personality and experience, and religion to her was more of a tradition than a spiritual matter. She believed deeply in Zionism, and in Quito served as president of the Women’s International Zionist Organization (WIZO).
My father had a thinner coating of Western culture. He did not have the linguistic facility of my mother and his speech was somewhat unrefined. I was told that as a child I said: “When mommy speaks, the words come out round but daddy’s come out square!” In some ways, my father was cultured, but seemed to be uncomfortable showing it.
Me, about 1½ years old.
Mainly, he was adventuresome. Migrating to Italy after World War I was in itself an unusual thing to do. Young Polish Jews went to Austria, Germany, or the United States. At that time, Italy was as unusual a destination as the headwaters of the Amazon. The number of non-Italian Jews in the country was perhaps 10,000, not much more. When he first got to Italy, my father traveled as a salesman. During this phase, which lasted a few years before he settled down and married my mother in 1926, he experimented with various spiritual beliefs, including Theosophy or Anthroposophy, I’m not sure which. These are now somewhat obscure factions, but I believe they were quite popular in the 1920’s. They certainly weren’t connected to Judaism in the least, but they must have appealed to my father’s craving for unconventional answers. Eventually, he returned to the fold, embracing Judaism more as a social than a spiritual matter. He cared a great deal about being a respected member of the community and almost constantly preached to me on the importance of having a “good name.” He once told me that he wouldn’t see anything wrong if Judaism were to disappear, as long as all other religions did too. An interesting concept that, atheism for all or for none.
From my father's service book. One entry
says: For unmilitary behavior towards a
Sea-cadet, 14 days of shipboard arrest.
My father was quite impetuous and irascible. Here is an early memory: I used to love to eat boiled potatoes cold (and still do, with a little salt). One day, when I was perhaps three years old, I started to scream aloud that I wanted “raw” potatoes, which is what I called them (“patate crude”). My yelling awoke my father from his nap and, mad as hell, he went into the kitchen and came back with a raw, unpeeled potato, and stuck it in my mouth. Much later in life, I learned that my mother had run back to Vienna six months after getting married. The reasons given were that Milan was no Vienna, but above all, that my father’s behavior included losing his temper in public places such as restaurants. He went back to Vienna and obviously persuaded her to return to Milan.
Strolling with mother.
He could also be very fatherly, protective, and much concerned for my well-being. We used to go on bicycle rides together and, on Sunday morning, ceremoniously went to a special stand in the city to buy bananas. Although I remember often being in fear of him, I remember that he inspired trust and authority. In the words of Goethe, “From father I got my build and my earnest way through life; from mother dear, my nature, and the passion to tell stories.” ("Vom Vater hab ich die Statur, des Lebens ernstes Führen, Vom Mütterchen die Frohnatur und Lust zu fabulieren.")
Me in fancy clothes.
What did my father do for a living? Early in his life in Vienna, where he spent a few years at the onset of World War I, he went to a technical school to learn drafting. During the war, he enlisted in the Austrian Navy, which now sounds like a joke, Austria being landlocked. However, at the time, the Austrians commanded part of the Adriatic coast and had something of a real navy. My father was assigned to a small ship and, according to a service book I still have somewhere, was once put in the brig for insubordination towards a cadet, but was also once awarded a medal. Legend has it that the medal was given because while on watch he spotted some floating objects that turned out to be casks half full of wine. After the war, he tried to work as a draftsman in the office of an Italian Jewish patent lawyer, Aldo Jarach. This didn’t last long, but they kept in touch and Jarach became my godfather. See, I had an Italian godfather! After traveling around Italy, my father settled down in Milan and sold Swedish vacuum sweepers and floor-waxing machines. He had a shop at home, where workmen repaired the machines. One of the employees built me a toy submarine, which consisted of a tube with cones soldered at the end and a propeller that was wound up by rubber bands inside. I took it to a park where there was a pond, let it go, and it sank almost immediately. No jokes about the Italian Navy, please.
Me about 12 years old on the slopes
with mother.
I am not sure why my father moved us to Turin when I was eight, but it was certainly for business reasons. He opened a store that sold raincoats, then called “paletót” in Italian, which were still something of a novelty at the time. In the winter, he also sold ski clothing, which allowed him to take the family to Sestriere, a ski resort in the Alps near the French border. There he rented a horse-drawn sled, which he festooned with ads and paraded through the town with me on board. That part was fun, trying to learn to ski was not. I felt cold, despite the ski clothing from my father’s store, and was pretty clumsy and never learned the skill.
We lived comfortably in Turin, in an apartment house in the suburbs. It was quite spacious and modern for the day. The store must have been doing rather well and we lived a nice middle class existence. We always had a maid. My memories of Turin center on the neighborhood where we lived. Around the age of 10, I joined a small group of kids who lived nearby. There was an empty lot next door with a half-finished building. Left behind was a wooden molding used in construction, roughly in the shape of a sled. On snowy days, we dragged this up a small mound of rubbish, perhaps 10 foot high, and “sledded” down the slope. More exciting was that there was a park nearby with grassy areas bordered by metal wire. We soon learned to break this wire, which may have been 1/4 inch in diameter, into four-to-five foot lengths. There was trolley line nearby, and we left the ends of the wires on the track for a passing trolley to flatten into something like a spear head. We played with these until somebody got hurt.
My second grade diploma.
Hanging on the wall of my office is a diploma I received in primary school. It says that I was awarded a Second Degree, whatever that is, in the fourth grade. The edge has a lovely design of flowers, urns, books, a lyre, a sprig of laurel leaves tied together with a ribbon with the words: “Scholarship, Work, Order, Diligence.” Prominently displayed at the top is the seal of Fascist Italy and below, in Hebrew, the words “Talmud Torah” (school) and the Star of David. The year on the diploma is 1938 and 5699 on the Jewish calendar. My teacher’s name also appears, Quinzia Amar (not that I remember her).
Chapter 2: The Last Year In Italy
Milan cathedral. Source.
First, let me recap a few facts. I was born in Milan in 1928 and lived there until I was eight, when we moved to Turin for three years. In 1939, we traveled to Genoa, intending to go to Australia. Here’s why we never got there. Our trunks were loaded onboard ship and up the gangway we went. Although we had a Polish passport as well as a valid visa to Australia, my father was soon called away and told that we couldn’t leave. The reason? The passport (not the visa) would expire ON THE WAY BACK. No matter how unlikely, the cruise line authorities didn’t want to take the chance that we could be denied entry into Australia, in which case they would have to bring us back without a valid passport. My father’s vehement arguments did not prevail and our trunks were unloaded, which is why I did not become an Aussie. My father decided to tough it out and stay in Italy, at least for a while. After three months in Genoa, we went back for a year to Milan, which was more familiar to my father. We eventually left for Ecuador in September, 1940, a few months after Italy entered the war.
In both Milan and Turin I went to a Jewish school, but I can’t say that I felt particularly Jewish before 1938. I felt quite Italian. In 1938, Italy enacted the racial laws (the Manifesto of Race), overtly because Mussolini yielded to pressure from Hitler. This condenses in one sentence a long and intricate story about how Italy went from being relatively free of anti-Semitism to having highly discriminatory laws. These laws mandated, among other things, that all the Jews who had resided in Italy for less than 20 years had to leave. By my reckoning, my father had lived there about 18 years, if that long. In addition, Jews were forbidden from holding offices or attending public schools, and were severely limited in their professions. I tell the story, without vouchsafing for the accuracy of my memory, of seeing a person on the street reading the newspaper headlines about these laws and asking: “What race are they talking about? Jews aren’t black or yellow or red.” True or not, the point is that many Italians did not think that Jews were a really distinct people. On the other hand, many Jews, especially in the professions, were hard hit. Some of my schoolteachers were ex-university professors who had lost their jobs and took on whatever work they could find to make a living. Their sentiments are well expressed by the first sentence we had to learn in our first Latin class. The teacher wrote on the board: “Homo homini lupus” (Man is a wolf to man).
My Jewish grammar school class. Don't the teachers look
professorial?
Kristallnacht took place in the fall of 1938 and I am sure that my parents knew all about it. We had several relatives in Vienna who were themselves keenly aware of what was going on in Germany. In fact, my cousins Hanna and Moshe came shortly afterwards, with their parents, to Turin and stayed for a year with us. I can only surmise how far back my parents worried about Hitler, but I am reasonably sure that they kept up with the news and must have been worried all along. My father was interested in current affairs, especially as they related to the Jews. It is unthinkable that he ignored the Nazis and what was going on in the North. I assume that, like many others, he had a hard time believing that the Italian Fascists would turn on the Jews. Basically, this is why he decided to return to Milan after our Australian debacle. He was confident that in Italy “there is always a way,” by which he meant that bribery and cajoling was possible. As in all things related to their marriage, my mother was quite passive and is not likely to have had a serious role in decision-making. I imagine that my father discussed matters with her, but that she probably agreed to whatever he planned.
Jewish Summer Camp on the Adriatic. I am at the first at the
left in the front row.
My memories during our last year in Italy are more vivid. Our apartment in Milan was small, two little rooms plus kitchen and bath. My father was scared enough that he didn’t venture out into the streets much. However, I continued to go to school and don’t remember having had to take any precautions. We were frequently visited by refugees, mainly from Austria, who were also afraid to be seen on the street and who played endless chess games in the apartment. There were increasing signs that the Fascists meant to cause at least some trouble to the Jews, such as deporting them to small towns. I don't believe that there were ever concentration camps in Italy, at least until it was taken over by the Germans in 1943. In this atmosphere, the sharing of facts and rumors was a way of life for this group. This surely included knowing which consul could be bribed to grant a visa that day (the “consul de jour”) and which ports one could enter without visas. These were chiefly Tangiers, Shanghai, and the Dominican Republic, but none of these were seen as desirable destinations as one could not work there. I was well aware that the atmosphere was very tense, and that everyone was scared. Years later, when I saw the movie Casablanca, some of the café scenes struck a chord with me. On the other hand, I surely did not pay constant attention to what was going on.
I have been asked on occasion how my parents reached the decision to leave Italy, but they never discussed it openly, so I can only surmise it. At that time, my parents probably knew few people who wanted to stay in Italy and must have been swept along by the exodus they were witnessing. Business was not going to be as usual. My father surely must have known that sooner or later he would lose his store. Leaving had been a major option for over a year and at times must have seemed like the only viable one. Feeling that they had little choice must have helped overcome the energy barrier required for the resolve. There is nothing in my memory to suggest that this was a difficult conclusion to reach, although surely it must have felt like a grave and scary thing to do.
My encyclopedia.
What kept me most busy at that time was reading a children’s encyclopedia (Enciclopedia dei Ragazzi), a set of 10 hefty tomes. I read it volume by volume, going from A to Z and practically memorized it. It served as the font of all sorts of loose facts that are still rattling around in my brain, especially regarding history and geography. I was not exactly studious and did only above average work at school, but had an intense passion for a mishmash of facts.
My father was something of a hero because he acted the part of the “Italian expert,” knowing the circumstances and even some of the people in the police. While we lived in Genoa, he participated in helping Jews escape by boat into France. On at least a couple of occasions, he traveled with them, which was certainly a perilous undertaking. I seem to remember that these trips were all done at night, under the cover of darkness. Knowing the language and the ways of the locals would have made my father quite helpful. I knew about these activities and was appropriately scared. On the other hand, I had the feeling that my father was invulnerable, as well as infallible, which contributed to my relative sense of calm. I had no doubt that he would pull us through, as he indeed did. This must obviously have been very helpful for my state of mind.
Where is Ecuador? Source.
Getting a visa to any place had become quite difficult as almost no country was eager to admit more Jews. I wish I could tell you that I felt distinct relief at the news that we had a visa to Ecuador, but I don’t remember it. My father came home and told us that we were finally leaving and that he didn’t really know where Ecuador was (or cared much at that point). I piped up that it was on the West Coast of South America and that the capital was Quito (pronounced in Italian “kweeto,” rather than the Spanish “keeto”). Unlike in Germany, Jews were permitted to leave Italy taking both possessions and money. Our possessions were packed in a big wooden crate the size of a small room. For some reason, the crates were referred to as “lifts,” don’t ask me why. Into our lift went some of our furniture, rugs, down-filled comforters, and nine of the ten volumes of the encyclopedia. I could not part with all of them, so I carried one, I don’t recall which, with me in a small green suitcase all the way to Quito. Does this mean that my database is skewed towards certain letters of the alphabet? Incredibly, the “lift” not only arrived in Quito but also got there at about the expected time. When you think about its tortuous path, this seems miraculous indeed. Shortly after we arrived there, I found that I had outgrown the encyclopedia (or is it that I had it just about memorized?) Eventually, we sold the whole set, without regrets.
I remember having friends in Turin but don’t recall any in my final year in Milan. I also have only sparse memories of our last few days there. We must have taken a train to Genoa in order to sail to Barcelona but I don’t recall this or the process of packing and leaving the apartment. Most likely, there were no unexpected events to impress me. I wish I could tell you that I was happy to leave, as surely I must have been, but I cannot base it on actual recollections. We left in September, 1940. I was twelve and one half years old.
I went back to Italy nineteen years later and have returned several times since. In 1959, my late wife Barbara and I were spending a two-year sojourn in Copenhagen. We traveled extensively to many places in Europe, including a major trip to Italy. I purposefully left going to my native city, Milan, to the end. The reason is that I wanted to just enjoy the sights on the rest of the trip whereas going to Milan would be a personal pilgrimage and I didn’t want to mix the two. Sure enough, my godfather, Aldo Jarach, was still alive there. I contacted him and we had a lovely lunch with him and his wife.
Milan’s Sforza Castle Source.
Memories of my life in Milan came back to me on this visit. For the first eight years of my life, we had lived in an apartment in a three or four story building very close to the center of the city. I remembered it, including the address. Barbara and I found ourselves in the main square of the city, the Piazza del Duomo, and I told her that I was quite sure I could find my way to the old house. As we walked on a wide street coming off at an angle from the square, I recalled that there had been a theater on the other side of the street, which used to have a live lion in a cage in the window. Sure enough, there was a movie house albeit sans lion. We walked on and I remembered that there would be a Y in the road and that we had to go to the right, which indeed proved to be Via Cesare Correnti. As we came nearer to No. 8, we found that instead of a house, there was a big space there. I tried to find out what had happened by poking my head into shops in the adjacent houses, which were in good shape. Somebody told me that my house had been bombed out, one of the few to suffer such a fate in that neighborhood. The person I was talking to said that she had moved in recently and didn’t know much about what had happened, but she thought that the son of the old concierge was still living nearby. She sent somebody to find him and, sure enough, a man in his mid-forties showed up. He was blind, his eyelids open and his eyeball facing upwards. No sooner had he come up to us and heard me say “hello” than he blurted out: “But you are Elio!” (Ma Lei é Elio!) I had been eight years old when we left that house. He then told me where our apartment had been, that I played in the courtyard with a girl called Anna Maria, that I had wanted to become a naval engineer. I could barely hold my tears back yet we couldn’t find much we could talk about, so we left. Twenty-three years had passed since I had lived in Via Cesare Correnti No. 8.
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