Walking and Wondering: Living Under the Sign of the Cross in the Shadow of the Swastika

By Robert

Shortly after moving to Spain and converting from Judaism to Catholicism, the events of those times - World War I and the Spanish Civil War - led Robert on an adventure even he couldn't have imagined. In his search for beauty, humanity and justice in the world, what followed was his struggle to stay alive long enough to be reunited with his family after World War II.

Countless jailings, deportations, and death sentences, could not dampen his spirits. It was fitting that he came to love the land of Don Quixote as his home. His wits, ideals and steadfast belief in the moral imperative, kept him going even when it seemed like death was certain.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert
• Release date: Oct 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301694006

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Walking and Wondering:

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Living Under the Sign of the Cross in the Shadow of the Swastika

By

Robert Salomon

Walking and Wondering: Living Under the Sign of the Cross in the Shadow of the Swastika

Copyright 2012 Robert Salomon

Published by Jemach, Inc. at Smashwords

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Translation Editor’s Note

Translating and editing this book for the family has been quite an experience. There were individuals who helped with parts of the translation and editing and the list of people to thank is extensive. Special thanks go to my cousin Ani, who undertook the arduous task of turning our grandfather’s memoirs into a book in Spanish. Without her efforts, this book may not have gotten off the ground. The English version took countless hours, reams of paper and lots of research.

Written Spanish is much different from written English, as run-on sentences are common. Further, the register and tone were much more formal. Getting the literal translation and more importantly, the meaning of not only what my grandfather said, but what he meant, required reading and re-reading the Spanish text and figuring out context. I spent countless hours on the phone with my father and even more time on the internet researching dates, facts and historical events to make sure the information presented was as historically accurate as possible.

My hope is that you enjoy my grandfather’s adventures as much as I did. Certain stories are not meant to disappear in history. I believe this is one of them.

Henry R. Salomon

Preface

This is my father’s book. He wrote it for his family, with love, in the mid 1950’s. His final edit was during 1958-1960 when Mom and he were living with me in Havana. I hope that my comments on these few pages will make the adventures and the message of my father’s book clearer to my four children and seven grandchildren who were all born in the U.S. My hope is, at the very least, to instill in them a clear sense of their roots.

During his life (1895-1968), my father was an exceptional witness to the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War and the Cuban Revolution. After reading his book, one would think that he was an adventurer, but in reality he was an idealist striving to conduct a productive normal life. Whether in high management positions at AEG in Spain or as owner of his own store or as a Cellist in the Havana Philharmonic Orchestra, or selling watches throughout Cuba, or later on as an executive for an American company in New York and Madrid, he always believed in the virtue of hard work.

He was a converted (and devout) Christian and had as his idols both Gandhi and Don Quixote. His favorite sports were mountain climbing (he knew the Picos de Europa like few people did) and swimming (for years the best long distance swimmer in Asturias). His passion was classical music. As an avid reader (in Spanish, French, English or German), his knowledge of philosophy, history and literature were truly impressive.

I was the youngest of four children. My mother was born in Cuba and my father in Alsace-Lorraine, which had changed hands between France and Germany throughout history. At the time of my father’s birth in Metz, it was part of Germany. We were all German citizens until 1940 when Hitler took away our citizenship – by way of government decree on May 14, 1940 – because we were Jewish. From a religious point of view, we were practicing Catholics, but for Hitler, the Jewish question was not one of religion but one of race.

Having lost our German citizenship, we chose Cuban citizenship since, according to Cuban law at the time, if you did not have the right to claim your father’s citizenship; you could claim your mother’s nationality with all the rights of a native person.

The above Cuban connection was the reason why in 1943, my father went to Cuba. Faced with having to leave Spain as a condition of his release from Franco’s imprisonment, he decided to start a new life in a New World. My brother Roberto, then a medical student at Madrid University, decided to go with him. It was a brave decision in order to help Dad to survive the exile and reunite the family as soon as possible…

One of the minor consequences of the wars and the absence of the family’s breadwinner, was a financial collapse. There were no more savings or properties left to sell. My two sisters took an intensive training course and started to work as secretaries to help with the survival process while my father and brother kept on working in Cuba so that they could get the entire family together again.

It was a long and painful process: the family was split in half, with the Atlantic Ocean in the middle for three and a half years! The economic hardships of the thirties and the early forties are difficult to comprehend for those who were born from the fifties onwards.

As circumstances permitted we all went from Madrid to Havana: first my sister Ana Maria, then me and finally my mother. It was not until 1948 that we were all reunited. The family reunion lasted until 1952, when my father got an offer from a U.S company to go to Madrid as their manager to open the Spanish market. The job required a few months of training in New York. This time it was my sister Ana Maria who decided to go with my father to New York. A few months later, my mother, father and sister returned to Spain.

My brother Roberto and I were about to graduate from University and convinced that Cuba was our final destination. We decided to stay.

Sometime in early 1958, my father retired and he and Mom accepted my invitation to come and live with me in Havana. I rented a furnished little house (Goicuria #809- Reparto El Sevillano) and my parents started to enjoy the sweet do-nothing of retirement. It was just two and a half years later, with Fidel Castro in power that my father and I agreed the future in Cuba was not good, neither for them to enjoy a well deserved retirement nor, for anyone who loved freedom and justice to build a future.

In October of 1960, I sent my parents back to Spain while I went to New York to start a new life. It wasn’t long though, before they had to come back across the Atlantic. My brother Roberto, my father’s beloved son, was diagnosed with cancer early in 1962. They stayed with me in New York while Roberto was at Sloan Kettering and later went to Topeka, Kansas to wait out his final days. His namesake died in June of ’62. Of all the trials and tribulations in his life, this was the event that scarred him the most.

I must confess that I did not love my father in the conventional way of a child who has played and interacted with his dad over the years of childhood or adolescence. He is, however, the man that I have most admired in the world for the integrity of his character and for surviving both adversity and injustice in good spirits and free of resentments. The story of his life, somehow, reminds me of the beautiful poem that Rudyard Kipling dedicated to his son: If

The Spanish Civil War robbed me of my childhood. At the same time, the consequences of the war intertwined with the Second World War and the forced departure of my father from Spain deprived me of my father for the ten most critical years of my life (seven years of war, prisons, etc., and three of Spain-Cuba separation.) During several of those years, we did not know if Dad was dead or alive! It wasn’t until the end of 1947, as a 19 year old young man that I was able to go to Cuba to live with my father and really get to know him, practically for the first time in my life.

It was in the morning, the last day of January 1968. I was at my office in the 19th floor at 120 Wall Street, just overlooking the river. My secretary had a person to person call for me from Madrid: I knew that something was wrong: My father had just passed away – the victim of a massive heart attack. I closed the door and cried like a child, with the kind of love that I had thought for years that I did not feel for him. I made arrangements to take the first flight to Madrid, and just made it in time to accompany him to the Cemetery.

His memoirs were originally written in both Spanish and German. The translation, for my grandchildren and their children and the generations to come, was a labor of love. While the book covers, in-depth, just a short period of time, there was much more to my father as a human-being, which is not covered in the pages that follow. His granddaughter, Ani, my niece, who was only 7 years old when he died, said it best about him: What I do remember, most vividly, is the intelligence, the congeniality, the tenderness and the immensurable kindness that he conveyed to me through his eyes, his smile, through every fiber of his being…

J. Eugene Salomon, Sr.

PART I: SPANISH ADVENTURES

Introduction

Like all human beings, I came into this troubled world without being asked to choose my nationality, race or religion. This was towards the end of the 19th century in the beautiful capital of Lorraine (Metz).

My parents were nominally Jewish, in other words, they were free thinkers - being emancipated Jews themselves. Their main ideals were maximum tolerance, love of liberty and humanity and love of all things good and beautiful. My good mother sarcastically informed me when I was young that I was born with two defects: first, that I was born a Jew; and second that I hadn’t chosen richer parents (for example, the Rothschild’s).

For ages it was customary in Hebrew families for their young to travel abroad in order to learn languages and broaden their horizons, while spending some years living in foreign countries.

Before turning 19 I found a job in Spain. In July of 1914, full of dreams, I began my journey. Just days before the beginning of World War I, I arrived at my destination – the city of Gijón, the famous port on the beautiful green coast of Asturias, in Northern Spain. Asturias is famous for its beautiful maritime scenery, high mountain passes and also for its apple trees and cider.

Asturias’ great claim to fame is having been the birthplace of the reconquering of Spain from the Moors, initiated by King Pelayo about a thousand years ago in the Valley of Covadonga. The Moors had brutally invaded Spain from Africa, reaching its most extreme points, dominating it for eight centuries. The point of retreat for the Moors following the defeat at Covadonga was through the valleys and ravines; terrain seemingly impossible for an army on horseback to traverse – especially the descent from the north of the Picos de Europa, through the Canalón de Trea, towards the extremely narrow and magnificent gorge of the Cares River and its escape to the west, where the valley broadens towards the port of Pontón. Historians say that the victorious Cantabrians chased the Moors, inflicting massive casualties by throwing boulders off enormous rocky outcroppings that stood over a thousand meters above the narrow valley, causing disorder and panic.

My voyage to Spain ensured my destiny of not becoming cannon fodder. Of course, since I had no role in the war, Germany lost.

Educated as a staunch pacifist, my stance was against Pan-Germanism. I loved my German identity my way (as a republican). At the same time I felt quite sympathetic towards France, among other reasons because it had ended the injustice of Jewish ghettos – which was an outrage - and in so doing became the first European country to outlaw them. Thanks to the influence of the poet and thinker Heinrich Heine’s beautiful works, I dreamt of humanism and brotherhood. Cosmopolitanism (all inclusive, unprejudiced, free-thinking tolerance) was my greatest hope – and it continues to be.

In the previous century, Heine had – well before his time – predicted the union of all the disparate and small German states. His idealism forced him, like many other patriots, into exile. His tomb lies in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. The German Unification finally took place in 1871, thanks to the vision of the great statesman Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor. My hope is that soon a United States of Europe – an idea originally conceived by Rathenau, Briand and Stresemann – will become a reality. And in the future I hope (although unfortunately we will not see it in this century, we should wish it for our children and grandchildren), I also hope for the formation of a cosmopolitan union, where humanity would consider the entire world, its homeland.

I owe my cosmopolitan mindset, other than to Heine - to the great writer and philosopher Goethe, especially to this verse taken from his novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities):

Wo wir uns der Sonne freuen,

sind wir jeder Sorge los;

dass wir uns in ihr zerstreuen

darum ist die Weit so gress.

Wherever we rejoice in the sun,

we are free of all sorrow;

so we can disperse ourselves in it,

because of that, the world is so large.

Schiller’s Joy to the World (all men will be brothers!), whose poetry Beethoven adapted so magically in his Ninth Symphony by requiring choirs to sing it, has been and continues to be my guiding motif.

I have been profoundly moved by the works of Spinoza, Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief, The Miracles of the Antichrist by Selma Lagerlöf, Kant’s Categorical Imperative, and especially by the works of Walter Rathenau.

I was most impressed by Gandhi, given that other than preaching passive resistance, he practiced it in India to combat the use of force. Moreover I was awed by the superhuman personality of Christ.

Constantine Brunner’s works also interested me (Jew Hatred and the Jews as well as Our Christ). Brunner had been a rabbi and later left Judaism. He preached a vibrant form of Christianity, which he wanted to unite with Mosaism (in other words, the Israelite religion).

As a young enthusiast for a better world, I tended to express myself frankly, sharing my pacifist ideals and convictions with my countrymen. My opinion that Germany would lose the war and become a republic brought me scorn and hatred. They chided me, saying that as a native of Lorraine and a Jew, I couldn’t be a good German. My response was, You fill your mouths with words from Christianity and you feel proud that the great philosopher Kant was German, but you haven’t digested, much less assimilated, either one. You’re pagans that justify your reason for being above all ethics. You’ll understand when the poor homeland is left in tatters. They laughed and made fun of me, calling me a crazy dreamer.

Upon the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, when Germany annexed the Ukraine from Russia, along with other territories, my opinion was, according to Christian doctrine and the philosophy based on categorical imperative - you shouldn’t inflict anything on someone you wouldn’t want inflicted upon yourself. Germany did not want to cede Alsace-Lorraine or give it autonomy to create a bridge between two cultures (France and Germany) rather than tearing each other to pieces, but now it was stealing territory from Russia. This treaty could only be temporary, because an unjust and imposed peace didn’t actually mean peace and it could not last.

Taunting and insults were the response. I had to resign myself to the idea that nothing could be done to prevent the senselessness of fanatics, and I responded, He who laughs last, laughs best; time will tell who is right.

To avoid further arguments, I ended the relationship with my countrymen. Because of my great disappointment with humanity I became a sort of hermit. For my "Weltschmerz" (world suffering) I discovered a sort of oasis in a villager’s home, not far from the sea. I was tempted, pushed by sadness, to end my life, but thinking of my wonderful mother and that suicide - a mortal sin - does not lead to anything, I gave up my gloomy thoughts. My duty was to keep on living and change the world – if such a thing were feasible given the circumstances at that time.

My parents hadn’t taught me the reigning prejudice of the time, that France was the main threat to the German nation, nor had they taught me the fanaticism that was prevalent, but rather the ethical concepts of humanism. They praised the spiritual above all else as the only value that mattered in life. This was in stark contrast with the dominant belief in brute force and the adoration of the golden bull, the symbol of money and materialism.

Towards the end of 1918, when Germany was defeated, many of my compatriots were shocked that I hadn’t gone with the victor. As a native of Lorraine, I could have and should have become a French citizen, based on the Treaty of Versailles. But changing my shirt and abandoning my German citizenship seemed to me to be indecent and shameful, even if it could have saved all our property. France seized everything through war reparations. The reason for my stubbornness and not falling into the great temptation was my belief that the Treaty of Versailles was not an honorable peace. Because of that it had to breed evil upon evil – everything is about revenge in this world. That dictated peace, among other things, made Hitler’s ascension to power possible - along with the regime of terror that accompanied it.

This (Satan’s executive power in Europe) played like a long movie for me, during which I felt as though I were dancing on a loose cord. The trash disposal unit that clamped upon me was filled with suspicions of espionage, which for many years would haunt me. Sometimes I think I worked against my fate, having not really chosen to act as a spy.

In order to describe those unsettled, piercing and heartbreaking times, I will recount various vivid episodes that I experienced. Since I’ve never been a man of many words, I beg leniency of the patient reader.

Suspicion of Espionage

In Spain, I experienced for the first time how easily a man could come under suspicion in times of war. My rural home had given me a new life, in which I dedicated my free time to hiking, swimming, literature, and music. Outside, free under the oak trees, we played in string quartets, passing the magnificent hours that allowed us to forget about war and the miseries of this world.

Public opinion in Spain, as well as the opinion of the press, was divided into two camps: Francophiles and Germanophiles. An anti-German newspaper from Gijón published an article one day about a young German man who lived near the coast and went out nightly signaling German submarines. It stated he was supplying them with fuel, and that the man also possessed a radiotelegraph station used for espionage, neatly hidden in a camouflaged device (alluding to my cello).

Truth be told, in those times German submarines were refueled and resupplied on that coast, in return for chemical products. But logically my collaboration was not requested, given my compatriots’ lack of confidence in my patriotism because of my opinions. They saw me as an uncertain Francophile from Lorraine – Jewish and revolutionary. I had dared to possess and express my own opinion, which wasn’t the opinion prescribed by the State. I criticized the invasion of Belgium and the correspondingly frivolous excuse that was delivered by Germany’s chancellor (Bethman-Hollweg): Necessity knows no laws ("Not kennt kein Gebot"). And it bothered me that Christ’s sermons had been compared to the world order, as well as having them used against His Majesty the Kaiser.

On the other hand, anti-German Spaniards looked down upon me because of the fact I was a German citizen. In their eyes, I was suspicious for living near the coast. I realized that I was often being watched. Given my love for long walks, I had a ball giving my watchers a hard workout (hiking at six kilometers an hour) and watching them get winded, or even better: abandoning their training.

One day a pair of Civil Guard officers came to my country home and executed a very detailed search of the residence. However, having not found gasoline nor telegraph equipment, they left me alone. Truthfully, nothing creates such inner peace as a clear conscience.

As for politics in general, I began to better understand more than ever before Heine’s sarcastic verse, which reads:

Geh’ weg, du Hund,

du bist nicht gesund.

Vor deinem Biss

bewahr’ mich, Jesus-Christ!

Go away, dog,

you are foul.

From your bite

save me Jesus Christ!

My countrymen, who claimed to possess a monopoly on patriotism, continued to meet at Café Setién on Corrida Street, producing a strategy inspired by beer and coffee. They’d gotten revenge on me by reporting me at the embassy in Madrid, as well as at the general management office of the German company branch at which I worked. I was called to attention at both places, under the pretext that I needed to be drilled back into reason. But they quickly lost all hope, convinced that I was a dreamer and a crazy person - "Weltverbesserer." (Someone who wants to fix the world.)

A Beautiful Spanish Woman and More Suspicions of Espionage

In 1915 I found myself accused of yet another case of espionage. The consequences of this inquiry played a large role in the future of one of my two brothers.

One day a man named Alvarez arrived at the office where I worked as an accountant. He was very agitated about his sister’s misfortune; she was a newlywed living in the north of France. Her French husband, who had a military rank, was the chief engineer of a group of mines, and had been captured by the Germans in the midst of an attack. The poor woman and her infant daughter were left alone in a war zone. Her relatives in Spain had tried to have her repatriated to Spain through the German Consulate and Embassy, to no avail. When the Spanish woman’s brother (she was now French by marriage) named the town in which she lived, I remembered that the small locality was not far from the French-German border in Lorraine.

I had been there many times with my mother and brothers on day trips. We usually returned very happy from those excursions, bringing with us contraband for home use (canned sardines and natural silk sheets.) Walking across the border was done on paths in beautiful forests, so as to avoid the customs officers. Such was the privilege of living near a border!

I promised Mr. Alvarez that I would ask my mother to visit his sister if possible, and at the same time attempt to wade through the necessary bureaucracies, in order to repatriate the two innocent people - trapped in the whirlpool of war - to Spain.

Quickly I wrote to my mother and to my brother who was stationed as an infantryman in the Argonne Forest, asking them to push the right buttons and secure the success for which we yearned.

My mother, a former nurse in the Red Cross, mobilized her influential friends and asked for a travel pass to visit this small French border town, but was denied. Without investigating further if they would allow her to make the trip, or not, from Moulins (halfway between Metz and the border), she made the trip anyway, walking twenty-five kilometers, bringing the poor young wife dresses, money and comfort. The young woman’s greatest joy was the hope that my mother gave her, that perhaps soon it would be possible to get her and her daughter out of the war zone. A few weeks later the Red Cross moved them to Switzerland, and from there, on to Spain.

My brother Max, on the other hand, wasn’t so lucky. He had been gravely injured in the Argonne Forest and was taken to a hospital in Freiburg, a town bordering the Black Forest. Shortly thereafter, my mother went to that city to visit him and perhaps try to assist him, because of her ties to the Red Cross. She was astonished that she was prevented from seeing him for a few days.

Later on we discovered that my brother was suspected of espionage, based on the correspondence I’d maintained with him concerning the young mother. It was rather easy to piece together under military censorship: Letters from a neutral country; addressed to a native of Lorraine who was also Jewish; discussing a Spanish-French woman married to a high ranking military engineer that lived near a border. Clearly, it had to be a case