Visuel de Sus: The Good Life
The four sisters who are the focus of this account—Estie, Susie, Piri and Fritzi Perl—grew up in idyllic circumstances in rural northern Romania in the early 20th century. During World War II, they were imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps, forced labor camps and refugee camps. After the war, they experienced the high life of Havana, Cuba under the dictator Batista, and then, as Fidel Castro’s revolution took hold, emigrated to U.S. to New York and Miami.
For generations the Perls lived in Visuel de Sus (VEE-show duh-soos), a picturesque village in Maramures County on the gentle western slopes of the Carpathian Mountains, a range also known as the Transylvanian Alps. The area had remained unchanged throughout the centuries, a medieval landscape of villages and hamlets scattered amid vast forests. Visuel is a few kilometers south of Ukraine (which the Perls referred to simply as Russia).
The area’s principle industries were tannin extraction, tanning, stone quarrying and flour milling. Wolf Perl, the family’s patriarch, owned a tannin extraction plant at the outskirts of town. Tannin is an ingredient used in tanning, the process by which leather is made from raw animal hide. Tanning dates back to antiquity.
In those days, Visuel was home to about 10,000 residents, a mix of Christians and Jews who coexisted semi-harmoniously over many centuries. Most of the area’s Christians were Romanian Orthodox. Transylvania was also home to large minorities of Catholics and Roma, or gypsies. Historically, anti-Semitism was epidemic in Romania, but the Perls, who were Jews, experienced little discrimination in Visuel de Sus.
Home and Family
The Perl home was a large second-story apartment with a curved ceiling located directly above the factory. The factory compound was on the outskirts of Visuel. Most of the family’s neighbors were poor farmers and gypsies. Wolf, who was a warm and convivial man, would have preferred to live in the village center, but Rose, ever fearful for his health (he had an enlarged heart), wanted him close to her and their six children, which meant living on the factory premises.
Tannin is produced by sheering the bark from trees and melting it and other plant materials in large, heated vats, which creates a thick, soupy compound. Noxious smoke is belched out of a chimney; thus, extraction plants are almost always located away from population centers.
Wolf’s business had been handed down through generations of Perls and thrived through the teens and 1920s under his stewardship. Great racks of logs would arrive in Visuel by steam train, which were hauled to the plant floor where workers operated bark peeling machines. The finished product was sealed in barrels and shipped to leather manufacturers in European capitals.
Visuel’s Jews received better treatment than their brethren elsewhere in Romania, being neither abused nor merely tolerated but viewed more as co-citizens. Wolf employed many gentiles, including a Romanian family who had the Perl children to their house on Christmas to help decorate the holiday tree.
Visuel’s summers were temperate and breathtaking (the town was a climactic resort). During the warm months Wolf limited his business travel, spending leisurely afternoons attending to his apple, plum and pear orchards. He was a self-taught botanist. Often he could be seen painstakingly brushing insect repellent onto the saplings; when he was done, the trees looked as if they had been smothered in white paint.
Relatives from the region’s largest city, Sighet Marmatiei, visited the Perls for a few weeks every summer, enjoying the pleasant environs and the clear mountain air at 1,500 feet. In fact, the warm months brought thousands of tourists to swim in Visuel’s sulfur hot springs, which were said to possess healing powers. Brilliant green oak trees towered high in the rolling hills above the springs, a beatific sight enjoyed by all.
In winter, the Perl children ice skated and skied. Sometimes Rose would lean out of the kitchen window to watch Fritzi, the youngest daughter, skiing on the nearby slopes with the family’s dogs bounding through the snow behind her.
The Transylvanian Alps experience an extended spring, and as the snows melted the Perl children swam in creeks made swollen with the icy waters that flowed from the mountains. Life was bucolic, lived in harmony with nature and in acknowledgment of an unspoken respect for life.
Although Romania is home to Europe’s largest population of large carnivores, including half the continent’s bears and more than a third of its wolves, the Perls experienced no trouble with wild animals.
Wolf and Rose
As a boy growing up in Visuel, Wolf Perl was a top student at Visuel’s Yeshiva, or religious Jewish school. He remained close to the school and its community throughout his life,, mentoring boys and serving continuously on its Board of Directors. Wolf and Rose embodied the traditional Jewish values of social responsibility, morality, charity and service, which they endeavored to pass on to their children.
Over the centuries, political control of Transylvania changed hands many times. From the 11th century until 1919, rule passed between Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. Wolf and Rose came of age in the “Hungarian era.” Thus, Hungarian was the primary language spoken at home.
When Transylvania was annexed by Romania in 1919, the Perl children were required to learn Romanian in school. The family, like most European Jews, already spoke Yiddish at home, making the children tri-lingual.
With five daughters and a son (Anci), the Perl household was bustling. Most of the activity centered around the large kitchen where Rose cooked throughout the day. A smaller adjacent room was used for baking breads and pastries. Jewish holidays were festive and exciting, and often included Wolf’s gentile friends and business associates as well as boys from the Yeshiva.
Though the Jewish population of Visuel (as in all Romania) was a segregated minority, Wolf endeavored to unite the Jewish, Christian and Roma cultures, seeking common ground whenever possible. Though a practicing Jew, he often did not wear a yarmulke and was inclined toward a secular perspective.
On the Passover holiday, the family gathered at the long oak dining table for the Seder meal, a traditional feast celebrating the liberation of the ancient Jews from slavery in Egypt. The family’s ornate and expensive Rosenthal dishes, which Wolf had purchased in Germany while on business, were brought out at such times. Wolf had in fact made many trips to Germany, where he purchased most of the machinery used in his plant.
The Perl children, awed and deferential to the patriarch, obediently looked on as Wolf, wearing a white yarmulke, performed rituals at the head of the table. The family enjoyed sumptuous holiday meals. Afterwards, Rose would employ the children to surreptitiously transfer leftovers to the area’s poor.
Wolf was a sensitive, intelligent man and a formidable business strategist. Though he had grown up in the backwoods hamlet of Visuel (which none of his customers had ever visited) he had attained a cultural sophistication. He made frequent business trips and was at home in many European cosmopolitan centers.
Rose, or Riesel (her Jewish name), was a generous woman who placed the needs of others above her own. Unlike Wolf, she grew up in a city, Sighetu Marmatiei, a half-hour’s train ride away from Visuel. The couple were joined in an arranged marriage, or shiddach.
The Perls would have been considered affluent for the time and place. The children’s needs were well met—in contrast to the destitute peasants and gypsies who surrounded them.
Children from the neighborhood routinely arrived at the Perl doorstep holding out tattered containers and water skins into which Rose would pour milk which had come from the Perl cow. She gave the children pears and apples from the orchard, as well as potatoes and other vegetables.
In the fruit picking season, Rose oversaw a collective effort in which the Perl children worked alongside the neighborhood children to stew pears and apples. The stewed fruit was then stored in jars. The task took a full day and into the night, and was a treated as a party.
On Purim, a joyous Jewish holiday, Rose baked cakes under which she placed bills and coins. The cakes were delivered by the Perl children to the area’s poorer residents.
Rose loved animals. The family owned dogs and cats. In the mornings, Rose was always the first awake; she would wake the live-in maid, a gypsy woman, to go milk the cow after which Rose would bring fresh milk to the children before they headed out to school. Rose wore a wig at all times. Her head was clean-shaven in the style of Orthodox Jewish women of the period.
In a tragic irony, a gesture of kindness typical of Rose, offered at the gates of Auschwitz, would lead to her death in the gas chambers in May 1944.
SIGHETU MARMATIEI
Visuel had no secondary schools, so the Perl children attended high school in Sighetu Marmatiei2, a city of 40,000 situated 60 kilometers northeast of Visuel. Sighetu, Hungarian for “island,” offered a rich cultural life.
Many generations of Perls attended public school in Sighet as well as Hebrew school. Each Perl child, on first setting eyes on Sighet’s high school, was said to have been speechless in astonishment at its large classrooms and gymnasium, which dwarfed the buildings in Visuel.
Whereas Visuel was looked down upon as backwoods, Sighet boasted theatres, restaurants, specialty shops, and a Yiddish newspaper.
Rose’s parents, Hershel and Gittle Berkowitz, lived in Sighet. The Perl children regularly visited them, boarding the train in Visuel for the short ride. In summer, Hershel and Gittle stayed with the Perls in Visuel for several weeks. The Perl children frequently visited their many aunts, uncles and cousins in Sighet. Estie, the oldest (and the boldest) of the Perl children, often traveled to Sighet on her own.
Wolf’s parents Yankle and Eka lived in Visuel. Yankle was a stern, religious Hasidic Jew feared by the Perl children. Whenever they visited, they were required to yield to the strict Orthodox law observed in the household.
ESTIE’S JOURNEY
When Hitler came to power as Germany’s chancellor in 1933, he immediately ordered a boycott of all Jewish shops, banks, offices and department stores in Romania. Under his rule, anti-Semitism spread throughout the country and all of Europe.
Remote Visuel de Sus, however, remained an island removed into the mid-1930s; the trouble in Germany and the approaching cataclysm remained a few years off. Life continued on as usual. The Perl children attended school in Visuel and Sighet, and Wolf’s business thrived.
Estie was the most glamorous of the Perl daughters. She possessed a movie-star beauty and a self-assured, adventurous spirit not unlike her father’s. Perpetually stifled in tiny Visuel, Estie traveled often to other Romanian cities for fun and excitement. In the summer of 1937, the 22-year-old rode the train along with an aunt to Vatra-Dornei, a resort town in the neighboring Bukovina region. Vatra-Dornei had a popular summer spa, a kosher restaurant and several Jewish-owned hotels and businesses.
It was there that Estie unexpectedly ran into a friend from Sighet who introduced her to her nephew from Cuba, Luis Rosenthal. Luis was a diminutive, effervescent and ambitious young man, also Jewish. He had grown up in Budapest. T
hirteen years earlier, in 1924, desperately wanting to avoid serving in Hungary’s anti-Semitic military, Luis hatched a plan with a few friends to sail for America and seek their fortune. But when the ship approached American shores, it was denied admittance; the quota for Hungarian immigrants had been filled. Dispirited, the boys landed in Cuba instead.
Nine months later, when Luis’ visa to the U.S. came through, he already owned a successful watch repair shop in Havana. He decided to remain in Cuba. Over the next decade he would build his business into a prosperous jeweler’s supply shop. Generally, Luis was contented, though unmarried, through his twenties and most of his thirties.
Missing his parents in 1938 he sailed across the Atlantic to visit them in Budapest. The whole family traveled to Vatra-Dornei, where he met Estie.
Luis fell in love with her. After their short time together, he traveled back to Cuba. Sad and love-struck, he wrote to Estie often. They commenced a year-long, cross-Atlantic letter-writing courtship in their native language of Hungarian. When he mailed her a marriage proposal in 1938, she accepted. Within a month the adventurous Estie was sailing for Cuba and an unknown destiny.
Around this time, the brutal Goga-Cuza government had seized power in Romania. It was a regime that not only preached anti-Semitism but made it state policy. For Jews of Transylvania, the tide was turning.
Like all Romanians, Estie had known war was coming and that the country would soon be thrown into horrific circumstances. Her hope was that once she was settled in Havana she could arrange to get her family out of Europe.
But war would come too fast.
WAR
In September 1939, one year after Estie’s departure, Nazi Germany invaded Poland. The following year, Hungary annexed Transylvania and once again Hungarians ruled the region. Romania officially entered the war in November 1940, joining the Axis Powers of Nazi Germany, Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria. With those alignments, Romanian Jews were in peril.
A year later, in 1941, Wolf Perl suffered a heart attack in Sighetu Marmatiei. He collapsed while playing chess with a physician friend in a hotel room and died a few weeks later, spared the coming nightmare. A year later, the only Perl son, Anci, fled into Ukraine. He served as a forced conscript in the Russian army.
Over the next three years, fueled by Hitler’s campaign to erase the Jewish population of Europe—his genocidal “Final Solution” to the “Jewish problem”—anti-Semitism spread and many thousands of Romanian Jews were murdered.
Romania’s ruler, Marshal Ion Antonescu, who was a loyal supporter of Hitler and a fierce opponent of the expansion of Soviet Communism, declared the Romanian Jewish population as Judeo-Bolshevik. Placing this image in the minds of average Romanians, he gave anyone a free hand to kill Jews.
Antonescu’s Iron Guard carried out many pogroms. In these large-scale violent attacks against Jews, the Romanian army and gendarmerie (police) massacred many thousands in northern Romania. In arguably the deadliest of all Holocaust-era pogroms, 14,000 Jews were killed by Romanian citizens, police, and military officials in the Iasi pogrom. However, no pogroms were carried out in the country hamlet of Visuel.
More than 360,000 Romanian Jews were killed in World War II, more than in all other countries except Poland (3 million) and Russia (1.5 million).
The Perls, now absent the patriarch, lived under Hungarian rule. The time of harmonious coexistence was over.
Read Part II
1 The author’s mother. Much of the research for this article came from interviews with Fritzi and Piri recorded by Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in 1995.
2 Sighet Marmatiei was the childhood home of Holocaust writer Elie Wiesel, who, like the Perls, was deported to Auschwitz in 1944. Estie’s oldest daughter Daisy married Alex Gross, a Holocaust survivor and a childhood friend of Wiesel.