My Family for the War (5 page)

Another voice answered, calm and quiet. “Who wants to know?”

“HE HAS A SMART MOUTH, THE JEW!”

Again the quiet voice, followed by more smashing and the sound of shattering glass. Papa! The glass fell out of my hand, water flowed over my banket and pajamas. I couldn’t think, but I kicked the blankets onto the floor, jumped out of bed, and flew to the door. Papapapapapa! My legs wanted to give out. I turned the door handle with stiff fingers. I heard my fast, shallow breathing.

My father stood with his back toward me. He was wearing his bathrobe and I saw his snow-white feet in slippers.

“HOW ABOUT A BOW BEFORE A GERMAN OFFICER?”

These brutes were no officers, even I could see that. They were just common Nazis in their crap-brown uniforms, but after hesitating briefly, my father must have decided it was all the same. He took position and saluted.

“PUT THAT HAND DOWN, JEW! YOU PIG, YOU’RE NO SOLDIER! I SAID BOW!”

“My husband is an officer and fought in the World War. He was awarded the Iron Cross,” sounded my mother’s
voice. There was just a hint of a tremor in it. Only then did I see Mamu, standing in the doorway to their bedroom in her nightgown, flanked by two men holding clubs.

“SHUT UP, BITCH! WHO ASKED YOU?”

My father rocked lightly onto the tip of his toes, then quickly, stiffly, let his upper body bend forward.

“DEEPER, YOU PIG. DO I HAVE TO SHOW YOU WHAT A PROPER BOW LOOKS LIKE?”

The Nazi responsible for the shouting took a step toward Papa, brutally shoved him down toward the floor, and at the same time rammed his knee into Papa’s face. There was a sound like when someone steps on a rotten board. Papa bent over forward and sank to the ground silently, pressing a hand to his mouth. Blood dripped through his fingers.

“GET UP! COME WITH US!”

“No, please! Franz! Franz!”

Mamu darted toward Papa with a step or two, but she didn’t get any farther. One of the two men who stood next to her held her arm tight and twisted it backward, so hard that she screamed, and threw her against the doorframe.

A gasp escaped from my throat, nothing more. No one could possibly have heard it. But with the heightened alertness of a bloodhound, the man who had hurt Papa lifted his head and our eyes met across the length of the foyer.

“Ah,” he said, suddenly very quiet, “you have a little one!”

I stumbled backward, back into my room.

Close the door, close it, shut it, why don’t I have a key, why won’t Mamu let me have a key, he’s coming through the door, he’s coming, why isn’t he coming, what can I put in front of it, there isn’t anything, I can’t look at him again, please, no!

Cold night air surrounded me. I crouched on the windowsill. Bekka’s voice went through my head:
“The tree is closer than it looks! I didn’t need that much momentum!”
I didn’t have her courage, I wouldn’t make it, I’m about to die, but it’s better than looking into those eyes again.

I jumped and didn’t feel the impact, didn’t hear how branches cracked and limbs broke under my fingers. My bare feet were like claws that dug into the trunk and climbed up. Up, not down. How did I know to do that? When the wolf looked out the window, I was six feet above him, above him and the light that shone out of my room onto the tree. He leaned far out over the windowsill and peered into the dark courtyard, then shook his head slowly, as if with regret, and closed the window. He even pulled the curtains shut.

Outside. Cold, moist air. Somewhere there was a voice calling, laughing, a clatter. Above the roofs in the direction of the city the sky glowed red and gold, lit up and pulsating like a dragon on the loose. The trunk of the birch tree was thin and supple up there, and it gently rocked me. I would never climb down.

The motion behind the curtain was so subtle that I almost missed it. I lifted my face, which I had pressed against the tree trunk, and with a fresh wave of terror stared through the branches at the little white figure in the fourth-story window. There was no question that she had seen me in my hideout. In my light pajamas I was crouched less than six feet away from her.

As soon as I recognized Christine I took off down the tree, fleeing. I didn’t stop for a second, even though it felt like my bare feet would split open with every step in the branches;
even though I was moving farther and farther away from my parents with each move. I didn’t know what had happened in our apartment in the meantime, but as long as I sat in the tree next to my room, I at least felt like I was close to them. I reached the ground and knew I was the only one left.

It was unbearable. My first impulse was to run right back up the stairs, and to give myself up to them.
You can do what you want with me, but let me be with my parents!

But then something odd happened. It was as if I were suddenly two different people. The new Ziska moved quickly through the courtyard in a crouch, checked the exit through the front entryway, saw the small crowd of people and cars on the street, and scurried back to climb over the wall to the yard behind the neighboring building. She dragged one of the garbage cans out of its place, slipped into the little niche behind it, crept along behind the garbage cans into the farthest corner of the enclosure, and huddled against the wall.

After a while there were no sounds at all coming from the street directly in front of our building. Way off in the distance I thought I could still hear a dull roar, maybe from the fire I had seen in the sky. Was it really a fire? Shouldn’t there have been sirens?

Tears tumbled from my eyes. I was just a ridiculous girl in her pajamas, crouched behind garbage cans, who had abandoned her parents. A coward who had run away to save her own skin.

Sobbing, I wrapped both arms around my knees and buried my face in them. Why did
I
have to be Jewish? It wasn’t fair! I hated it! It would have been better never to have been born in the first place!

“Ziska? Ziska, are you in there?”

I startled. A shadow appeared in the gap behind the garbage cans. At first I saw the schoolbag that was pushed forward, then—on all fours—a familiar figure. “I have to go right away so no one notices! Here, wait…”

Christine reached into her backpack and pulled out a pair of shoes and her lunchbox. Anxiously, she shoved both of them toward me. Finally, she took off her coat and laid it on the ground in front of me. She was wearing a second one underneath it. Only then did I understand that she was trying to help me.

“Where are my parents?” I whispered.

“I don’t know. They took your father away. Your mother might still be in the apartment,” Christine said in an unconvincing tone.

“Could you look?” I spluttered.

Christine pulled back a little. “I don’t dare, but I’ll bring you something to eat and a blanket as soon as I get home from school!”

She crept backward, gave me an encouraging smile, and then disappeared. I reached for the shoes and pulled them onto my feet, which were blue from the cold. I put on the coat. It took a while before it warmed my chilled body. In the lunchbox were two sandwiches and an apple. I devoured everything. I was alive.

I must have held out until about noon in my hiding place. Once someone came and brought out trash. He or she didn’t discover me, but the horrifying image of one container after the other being pulled out of the enclosure while I scurried
along the back wall like a cornered rat ran through my mind.

The longer I thought about it, the greater my panic became. Finally I couldn’t stand it any longer. I pulled Christine’s coat tighter around my shoulders and crawled out into the open. I would crawl back over the wall, slip into our building, and find out if Mamu was in our apartment!

But as soon as I was outside I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it. My knees trembled, though I couldn’t say if it was from fear or the result of crouching motionless for hours in the cold. I would have to go through the building out to the street and enter our building from there. Hopefully no one would notice that I was wearing pajamas under the coat!

Luckily, the door to our apartment building was open. Christine’s shoes, which were a size too big for me, made more noise than I would have liked on the stairs, but I couldn’t do anything about it.

And as if I had had a premonition, the door to the apartment on the second floor opened. Frau Bergmann, now, of all times! But instead of harassing me like she usually did, she only opened the door a crack, looked at me as if she was seeing a ghost, and slammed the door shut again! Right then I knew I would find something awful upstairs.

The last flight I had to hold on to the banister and pull myself up. My view never wavered from the kicked-in apartment door hanging from one of its hinges.

“Mamu?” I whispered. No answer. Finally I overcame my fear and stretched out my hand to push the door open.

I stood in the middle of the foyer. The world ceased to exist, there was no sound other than the splintering of the glass shards under my shoes. I moved through our rooms
step by step and felt nothing, not even fear. I took in the damage, studied each and every room thoroughly, but this ravished apartment was no longer my home.

Papa’s office was in chaos: books and papers shredded, the desk overturned, pictures ripped off the walls. The shattered glass cabinet in the living room, Mamu’s priceless porcelain—our means to Shanghai on the floor in a thousand pieces. In my parents’ bedroom, clothes and bedding were scattered everywhere.

My room. Strange, they hadn’t touched anything here. It must have been enough that I had plunged out of the window—they thought—to my death.

I backed out again and stood still, in a daze. In the middle of the foyer was a little pool of congealed blood marking the spot where Papa had been beaten. Red drops made a trail, and I followed it to the door of the apartment. Only then did I glance at the wall. Next to the doorpost, at about my eye level, was a bloody handprint, as if Papa had leaned against it there to support himself.

And that hand on the wall was what abruptly freed me from my frozen state. Papa! Mamu! I dashed back into my room, hurriedly threw on some clothes, and ran out of the apartment.

On that day, when everything that was certain was lost, I followed my familiar route to school down to Bergstraße. This was Mamu’s preferred shopping area. People in many of the stores here knew her, and someone would surely have seen her. I started at Krämer’s.

“Hello, Herr Manz, has my mother been here today?”

“No, Ziska, not yet.”

“When she comes, will you tell her I’m looking for her?”

“Of course, Ziska, I’d be happy to!”

On my way out, I felt the customers looking at me. Was I mistaken, or had someone said “. . . the poor child”?

My next stop, Schumann’s gourmet shop, wasn’t fifty yards farther along. I could already see from a distance how people were making a wide arc around it, and as I got closer I could see why. The street was full of broken glass. The display window with the Star of David painted on it had been smashed in, and two Nazis stood in the entrance smoking cigarettes. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the Schumanns with broom and dustpan—under the watch of an SA man—cleaning up what the Nazis had destroyed. Broken glasses and bottles lay on the floor and dented tin cans swam in a messy sauce of marmalade, spices, and preserved foods. A small cluster of people had formed in front of the broken display window near the dry goods shop. Women stared at yarn, scissors, and fasteners. The little shop seemed to be intact. Suddenly, one woman made a grab for it, the spell was broken, and there was no holding them back. I saw balls of yarn, buttons, and thimbles flying through the air and heard the clinking and clattering as the rest of the windowpane broke and fell into the display. Hands grabbed over my head as I fought my way through the throng of bodies to the curb. Two boys in Hitler Youth uniforms leaned against a streetlamp and laughed.

I had already figured out that we weren’t the only Jews who had been raided during the night. Gradually it dawned on me what else that meant: There probably wasn’t a single
Jewish shop on Bergstraße that hadn’t been damaged. I definitely wouldn’t find my mother here.

And then suddenly it came to me: Bekka! The Liebichs! Of course! Where else would my mother look for me, if not with my best friend?

“Ziska, finally!” She dragged me into the apartment and turned the key in the lock. “Where were you? Your mother is looking everywhere for you!”

“I’ve been looking for her too!” I wanted to wait until later to tell Bekka that I had spent the entire morning hiding behind garbage cans. “I was on Bergstraße,” I added.

“Are you crazy? It could start up again any minute! My mother won’t let me go outside at all.” She pulled me into her room. As we sat down on her bed, I discovered that Bekka’s eyes were red from crying. “They’ve gone to Hamburger Straße. To see if they can get the men released.”

“The men? Your father too?”

Bekka nodded. “My father and my brother.”

Bekka’s little room, decorated with Shirley Temple posters, spun in circles. Thomas, Bekka’s fifteen-year-old brother, was the pride of the family, a talented pianist.

“It was awful,” Bekka whispered. “They had to go with them right away. They weren’t even allowed to get dressed.”

“Did they beat them up?”

“No!” Bekka cried, her eyes widened with fear.

“Ransack your apartment?”

Bekka just shook her head. “Then you can be glad,” I said.

“Are you nuts?” She gave me a shove that almost pushed me off the bed.

“Do you want to trade places?” I flared up.

I pressed my lips together and stared down at the tips of my shoes. “On Bergstraße there’s broken glass everywhere,” I said after a while.

“That’s what I heard. And they supposedly burned all the synagogues in the whole city.”

“What? The synagogues? All of them?” I was outraged. So that was the fire I had seen during the night. “And what’s on Hamburger Straße?”

“The Gestapo prison. Three of them went together, your mother and mine and Frau Grün. They took clothes with them, and some medal of your father’s.”