Last Train to Paris by Michele Zackheim

Author:Michele Zackheim [Zackheim, Michele]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Historical
Goodreads: 18114404
Publisher: Europa Editions
Published: 2014-01-07T05:00:00+00:00

But all those years ago, I couldn’t leave the human-interest stories alone. I continued to look at the perilous situation of the disenfranchised. This group grew daily—Romani, Jews, homosexuals, the disabled, Catholics, clergymen, nonconformists, communists. Even mixed-race children were considered enemies of the state. These children were the offspring of the black African colonial soldiers of the French army from the Great War who had married German women. There were also a number of black American musicians who, fed up with Jim Crow, had immigrated to Germany in the twenties. Many had married German citizens. Hitler called their children “Rhineland bastards.”

For the past few years, I had been friends with a man named Richard Moses, a black American jazz saxophonist. Richard had been born and raised in Harlem, but had moved in 1926 to Berlin where avant-garde music was popular. “I liked the mixture of cultures,” he told me. “Mulatto chorus girls from Cuba; Senegalese waiters, with their singsong French and mystifying Wolof; White Russians standing outside bars encouraging people with their funny German accents to come in and enjoy the earthly delights. It was a cool time.”

Berlin in the twenties offered him a freedom that he had never experienced in America. People took his music seriously. He ignored the Nazi threat. Then in the 1930 elections, Nazis were chosen by the people to represent them.

By then Richard had married a German woman, Daria Möhring, and lived in Charlottenburg at Savignyplatz. They had two children: Coleman Hawkins Moses, named after the great saxophone player, and Annelie Edith Moses, looking like a little bird when she was born–like Edith Piaf. There was always music in their house: practicing the sax, playing the piano, singing.

‘At first,’ Richard once told me, ‘there were no racial epithets shouted toward the stage. Or perhaps it was because it took me such a long time to learn German that I didn’t understand what was being said from the audience. Hey Rosie,’ he said, ‘being naïve gave me my freedom–for a while. Then, as time went on, my German became more proficient and Hitler’s ideas became more pervasive. The shouts from the audience became menacing, and I began to dread going to work.’

When Leon and I returned from our night by the sea, there was a message from Richard asking me to visit. “It’s important,” he wrote. Saturday afternoon, I took the noisy, elevated S-Bahn to Richard’s neighborhood. I walked for a few minutes before arriving at an enormous block of apartments that had been built in the nineteenth century for the middle class. On either side of the massive wooden carriage doors were two large chestnut trees, now barren of leaves, but still impressive. Inside was the courtyard, and I could swear that I still smelled horses. Going to my left, I entered the ground floor and saw the warning VORSICHT! FRISCH GEBOHNERT. ATTENTION! FRESHLY POLISHED. A lesson in fascist duplicity, I thought. This warning was in every apartment house in Berlin, even if the floors were filthy.

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