Grapenuts

Achim lived with us for a year – 1940 to 1941 – in the smaller of two bedrooms on the third floor of our house in Madison, Wisconsin. I was seven the autumn he came to us from Vienna. My brother David had met him the summer before, at a Quaker school in Iowa. Achim was twenty-seven, one of several refugees sponsored to come to the United States. In 1940, everyone in Austria was well aware of the danger facing the Jews, though most Americans knew little if anything about it.

At our house, weekday breakfast was an informal affair. We ate at our own convenience, Shredded Wheat or Grapenuts, plus fruit and milk. I mostly only saw Achim at dinner and on weekends. He spoke funny I thought, but he and I were friends right away.

He was a little awkward in our kitchen and wasn’t used to getting his own breakfast. I remember sometimes we’d have a big can of fruit juice open in the fridge, and Dad had to show Achim about punching a second hole in the can so it would pour. Dad was certainly never any great shakes domestically, but even he knew more about kitchens than Achim. The only son of an affluent family, Achim had been pampered as a child in Vienna.

Most mornings, Dad and Achim left together on foot for the campus two miles away – Dad, an English Literature professor, heading for his office and classroom, and Achim on his way to the Law building. He was earning a second law degree, since his Viennese law degree was useless in America. Achim was a trifle heavy and appreciated the exercise, talking and laughing with Dad as they strode up and down the hills along their way.

When David left for boarding school that fall, Achim partly filled the role of brother for me, though he was a good twelve years older than David, and twenty years older than me. Once in a while, I’d pay him a brief visit in his room upstairs. Achim spoke warmly about the white poodle in the only photo on his desk – her name was Sasha, and she wore a little ribbon between her ears. Achim didn’t speak about his family.

One Sunday afternoon, I was running up our stairs two steps at a time, and I tripped. I split my chin and burst into screams. Dad galloped up from his study and Achim thundered down the stairs from the third floor – I can still hear them! They rushed me to the emergency clinic, where my chin was stitched together as the two men paced the room. They were a comfort.

Some wonderful gifts for me from Achim turned up under our Christmas tree that year. My favorite was a portfolio of cat drawings by illustrator Clare Newberry, with black-and-white sketches of kittens, tomcats, and fluffy tabbies. A book of Beethoven piano sonatas, encouraging my early music efforts, and a Whitman’s Sampler box of chocolates were other treasures. How grown-up they made me feel!

That summer, Achim quit his waiter job in northern Wisconsin because a co-worker called him a dirty Jew. Those ugly words sank deep into my mind and heart as I realized, at eight years old, that we were fighting Hitler about something that was also going on right here in America.

The next year, after Achim had moved out of our house and into a room closer to the university, I came home from school one day and found him talking with my mother in our living room. His face was beet red. She asked me to go upstairs to my room, and I did as I was told with no question. I could tell right away this was a special situation.

I don’t know how much she explained to me later. But eventually I learned that Achim’s entire family – parents, grandparents, uncles, and aunts – had been shipped in a freight car to Auschwitz, where they were gassed. I learned too that Achim had resisted leaving his family in 1940, but his mother had insisted he go, putting him on the train for Italy and forcing into his hands the ticket for the boat that would take him to America.

Although all of Achim’s family could easily have afforded the trip to America, they were forbidden access to their bank account. And there were elders in the family, who couldn’t survive such a trip. So Achim’s parents, uncles, and aunts stayed behind to support the old folks.

* * *

Humans can be resilient. When the war ended, Achim joined the U.S. Army and was sent to the Nuremberg trials as a lawyer. He returned with a beautiful Austrian bride and began a successful family law practice. They raised their children and knew the joy of grandchildren.

Can a young, white, Gentile girl understand racism, a little girl tucked safely away in Wisconsin, playing jacks, cuddling with her cat, jumping rope, climbing trees with her friends, taking piano lessons, and munching Grapenuts for breakfast?

The answer is yes. Forever. ~~~

Elspeth Benton is a member of Redwood Forest Friends Meeting in Santa Rosa, California (PacYM).