Godfrey's Guide

her story of bygone days began with:

"IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT...
I REMEMBER ONLY THE VISION of amber ash floating slowly upward with the wind beneath the darkened sky, as I watched what I thought were the cindered remains of my mother and father and older sister and brother floating away, mingled with 782 other Jewish men and women and children who had been put to their deaths throughout that dreadful night.  It was the 7th day of September in 1943.  I had turned 9 the day before..."  

  ...She then went on to haltingly describe her surrounding, explaining that barrack huts lay ahead of her, watch towers were to her left and right, with a nine-foot stone wall guarding the perimeter.  At the main gate was Guard Tower A with the words "Arbet Macht Frei (labor makes you free) etched beneath the tower.  She has other memories, as well: Those of watching the construction of a gas chamber and oven by Commandant Anton Kanidle in March of 1943, which had been initiated as a means to kill larger numbers of prisoners; of the equilateral triangle with a semi-circular roll call area, a layout intended to allow machine gun posts in the entrance gate to dominate the camp; and the additional area (sonder lager) outside of the main camp perimeter to the north; built in 1941 for special prisoners that the regime wished to isolate for future medical experimentation.  She was 35 Kilometers north of Berlin, housed in Ornanienburg, Germany inside of the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp.

  In early morning of that dire day, alone in a drowsy fog of fright, she began to think for the first time about death; to to summarize her life, searching for meaning or drafting some imaginary future for herself that did not include death and destruction and fear, and wondered how she could manage a life without a mother or father or sister and brother.  It seemed absurd, even outrageous, to think she would never taste freedom again, never set her eyes upon the light spilling over the valleys of her beloved Bavarian Alps, or look at paintings in the magnificent Nationalgalerie in Berlin.   And what about the worlds she had yet to see and the adventures she might never experience?  She had memory of someone shouting, "God, please let me die!"  

  Beyond that long morning, she remembered only memories of being escorted to Sonder Lager to be experimented on by Nazi doctors, who put tubes in her arms, of foraging for food while the guards played handball and ate thick pork and sausage sandwiches as her fellow inmates starved to death, she watched the guards smile at her and throw kisses at her, walk over and lift her up and slam her viciously to the ground; of her looking up at them and whispering to herself, "I swear to God, I will outlive all you...!"  And when the Soviet Army liberated Sachsenhausen on April 22nd in 1945, she and other survivors pointed out the most despicable guards to the Soviets, then watched in silence as each of them were lined-up and shot to death by a machine gun.  "I could not help myself," she said, "As their blood-spattered bodies fell to the ground, I smiled, then went over to the corpses and spat on each and every one of them..." 

  Once liberated, she returned to Berlin, where worked every day, seven days a week at any job she get, her body ached with anxiety, her mood was irritable, her night dreams grew wild with unconscious memories of her past, but she saved her money; and after saving enough of it, she landed in the harbor of New York in the fall of 1952.  She was now 18, and was delighted to hear the music of Benny Goodman from a radio in the corner stationary store, to be where there were apartments with three bedrooms and views of the river, where she could hurry across the street and stand under the Biltmore clock, with rain falling in her hair, where waitresses called her honey, and she slept with windows open to the air of a wonderful spring night.  At last, she felt safe.

  She had turned into an impossibly beautiful girl, and worked at the Figaro, where the most gorgeous waitresses worked at night, and modeled for magazines like Vogue and Cosmopolitan during the day.  "I was very fortunate to have been blessed with good genes," she said.  On one rainy evening in the winter of 1958, she was home alone when the telephone rang.  She picked up the receiver, looking out at the street, and heard one of the most familiar voices of the century.  It was Frank Sinatra.  They had met earlier that year through Shirley MacLaine, who had become her friend, and it was clear to her that Sinatra admired her honesty, loved her beauty, and in some complicated way was a little afraid of her.  They would be friends until the day he died.

  Then, in 1963, everything changed.  That year she arrived in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico at the age of 29 and on vacation, when  John Huston arrived with a crew of 130 to direct the movie version of Tennessee Williams's Night of the Iguana. Huston approached her while she was dining in a restaurant called El Panorama, told her that she reminded him of Ava Gardner, and asked if she would like to be a stand-in for Miss Gardner in the movie he was shooting.  Miss Garner had abandoned Hollywood for Europe after disastrous marriages to Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw, and Frank Sinatra.  She politely declined the offer, saying that she was a friend of Mister Sinatra.  

  She excused herself, went for a stroll and then back to her hotel, where she could walk onto the balcony and look out over the town to the sea, and made the decision that this was where she might want to live.  The following morning, she met a brown-skinned man named Marcos, who was 40.  "I come on my horse in the morning from there, up by Nayarit," he said.  "I give people rides.  They pay me.  Then I go home." He smiled broadly at her, then added, "And all day while I am working I am in a beautiful place."  She decided to stay awhile longer.  She would wander down to Le Bistro, on the island in the river, and hear good recorded jazz, have a wonderful laugh at the restaurant called La Fuente de la Puente (The Fountain on the Bridge), and hear the sound of the rooster at dawn with the healing benevolence of the sun and the salt of the sea.  She was in a place very charming and not damaged.

  "I go to New York, and it's cold outside in Winter and sweltering inside in Summer.  But there the windows were always open," she said.  So she bought into a small bed-and-breakfast 6 room Inn near the El Panorama Restaurant, which had a small flower shop in the lobby that sold wild orchids, roses, and African  tulips; as well as another space for Mexican folk art; and stayed in Puerto Vallarta.

  It was late in the afternoon of July 6th in 1968, when a man in a yellow long-sleeved shirt walked into her flower shop and introduced himself as David Marwell, said that he was the director of the Berlin Document Center and a key investigator in the hunt for Nazi war criminals Klaus Barbie and Josef Mengele, and that if she wouldn't mind, he would like to have a talk with her.  She, of course, immediately agreed.  They walked along a crowded street where kids were pedaling tricycles down a steep hill and people in sandals and straw hats were licking shaved ice and eating watermelon.  He then told her that her brother and sister were still alive, that they had been sent to the Mauthausen Concentration Camp in Austria prior to the death of her mother and father, survived, and were living on the American West Coast, unaware until only recently that she, too, might still be alive.

  They had gone to Hungary after the war's end, he said, and lived in Prague, which was then under the domination of the Soviet Union.  In 1956, Stalin ism was still in power, its authority reinforce by the need (real or imaginary) to resist an outside threat.  A student protest began, which turned into a revolution, her brother and sister fighting with the students for freedom, with the slogan: We are not going to do to them what they have done to us.  "That would be the worst corruption of this revolution's ideals.  We want a country that is generous and decent, and where every man can speak his peace." said one filmmaker named Antonin Masa.  And they won.  Her brother, however, had been severely beaten by a Soviet soldier, suffered a spinal injury, and her sister insisted that they come to America for medical treatment.

  And then she paused for a moment, looked at me with tears in her eyes, and said: "After an initial period of bafflement, I knew that this was going to be the most wonderful day of my life.  My mother and father, Janice and Irving, were dead.  My sister and brother, Benjamin and Elyse, were alive! I asked Mister Marwell how he had found me.  He said that my sister Elyse had been leafing through an old copy of Vogue Magazine, saw a photograph of me, thought that I bore more than a striking resemblance to our mother and wrote to him with background information on the family, asking him that if he had either the time or inclination, she would like to see if  he could find out more about me, to find out if I might be her sister."

  Over the years, wildly fluctuation of emotions had become a basic  component of her life - she wanted to erase all memory of Sachsenhausen - to become urbane by living in the city of New York, and in some critical way, mark those long ago days of experience in World War Two off the stage of her history.  She now knew that was impossible.  She was  almost 34 years-old, and another new beginning lay ahead.  After bidding David Marwell goodbye at the airport, she returned back home and made a telephone call to an old friend, telling him the astonishing news about her brother and sister, that she had her sister's telephone number, but did not know how to begin the conversation.   Frank Sinatra told her that he would get in touch with her, make arrangements for the three of them to meet, would get back with her when that was done, and that she ought to immediately fly back to New York.  "I'll get back with you in a jiffy, Kid."   He hung up. He called back within the hour.  She called the airport to make a reservation... 

  ...And on the 2nd day of August in 1968, she took a cab to Jilly's, a seedy time warp of a saloon at the Eight Avenue end of 52nd Street in the city of New York.  It was Frank Sinatra's favorite hang-out.  "Yes, ma am," the maître d' said.  "Mr. Sinatra has a table for me," she replied.  He turned, his eyes moving past the empty tables at the booths in the left-hand corner against the wall.  Sinatra looked up from a booth and smiled, and she was let through.  A woman and man were sitting to his left and his right.  "Hey, Lady," Sinatra said brightly, coming around the end of the booth and giving her a hug.  "I've got a reservation for the three of you at the Waldorf, a limo outside to take you there, and insofar as the meal is concerned, the tab is on me." Sinatra paused paused for a moment before he added, "Oh, yeah, by the way, this is your brother and sister.  Grab a seat." 

  She moved clumsily toward the table, Benjamin and Elyse stood up.  And her blue eyes looked at two people she had once dearly loved and who she thought were dead.  Elyse and Benjamin moved slowly around the table.  The three of them hugged in silence, broke out in tears, stared in awe at one another, and then began to laugh.  "Gotta go," Sinatra said with a smile.  He gave her a wink, and departed.  The three of them sat down and talked for six hours.

  After that, the limousine pulled up in front of the Waldorf, where the three siblings would stay for another week, getting to know each other all over again.  Benjamin was now living in Sacramento, California and made his living as a Medical Doctor; Elyse was an Assistant Professor, teaching literature at Stanford University in Stanford, California.  Both of them had never married. Enchanted with Puerto Vallarta on a visit shortly after that, Elyse and Benjamin would continue to drop in on her for one month each and every summer after that, where they caught up on decades of lost laughter and missed love.

  It was in May of 1998, Frank Sinatra passed-away, and she flew to California to attend his funeral.  "Most mourners gathered there talked of the symmetries of his legend," she said.  "I thought of him as a good and dear friend, who once was a boy on a Hoboken street in his Fauntleroy suit, who a half century later, was still trying to figure out what it all meant.  He made my life whole again, and to this day,  I miss him."  She gave a smile, then added: "Frank was like the song he made famous, he always did it his way." 

  By then, she was 63 years old.  Her sister had passed-away from natural causes that same year and after attending her funeral, she knew that she had arrived at last in that peculiar zone where she was no longer young  and not yet old, which caused her personal astonishment.  She had live a life, and felt far from finished with that splendid accident, knowing that the path was heading inexorably through the evening to the barn.  And not far away, up ahead, perhaps over that next lavender hill, lay death; so she decided to come full-circle and return to Sachsenhausen  to give her mother and father, Janice and Irving, a final farewell.  

  "I recalled the starvation, disease and forced labor," she began. "Explored the execution grounds, crematorium, pathology laboratory, hospital and the 'pit' into which the bodies had been thrown, and felt remorse that the two of them had died when they were still in command of their youth.  I could not help but feel that my mother and father were smiling down at me, and that itself was worth the trip. My mother and father and I had now, somehow, come full-circle..."

  Her name is Elsibeth.

  She will turn 80 this September.  Now suffering from a disease called macular degeneration, which  causes loss of central vision, she is now resides in Sacramento, California, where she came to take care of her brother Benjamin, who had cancer and passed away in 2010; and with the role of the dice and sheer good fortune, my being a volunteer to senior citizens, I began to read to her three times per week not many months ago, and am eternally grateful that she has shared her bygone days with me...



she recently made the decision to return to Puerto Vallarta come Spring and I thank God that she came into my life, and will forever miss her and the majesty of her courageous heart and soul...