Secrets She Kept Page 11

  I strained my neck, my eyes, but could barely see past the crowd pressed to the blockade. A car horn blared from behind, an official car with swastika flags flying. I pulled my bike onto the curb, ducking my head. The crowd parted and the driver pushed through. I lifted my eyes just in time to catch the profile of a man against the back window—Dr. Peterson, surely!

  Brownshirts patrolling the blockade shouted for the crowd to disperse as groups of people were pushed and dragged from their houses. Two shots fired into the air told us they meant business. People fell back upon people.

  Please, I prayed, not Frau Bernstein. Let them leave her. Let her hide. Let me take care of her.

  The crowd had not complied with the order, at least not quickly enough to please those in charge. Gasps and cries rose from the front of the crowd as brownshirts pushed them, roughing them up. I pulled my bicycle back and turned the wheel as quickly as I could. I didn’t want to go. I wanted to see Frau Bernstein one last time, to give her sugar and soup. I wanted to pull her aside, reassure her that she could stay, that I would come in two days and help her find a new place to live and hide. That everything would remain the same between us. But I couldn’t risk being seen by Dr. Peterson, couldn’t risk having my bicycle confiscated, couldn’t risk identification by begging for the life and freedom of one old Jewish woman.

  The moment I turned the corner I pedaled—faster and faster—to the Kirchmanns’, abandoning the rest of my route and my supposed identity, tears of fear and frustration, of futility, streaming down my face, sure there were Gestapo at my heels. I broke every courier’s rule so carefully planned and rehearsed. Fear is a formidable enemy, as real as the foe that openly threatens.

  I threw my bike against the wall and burst into the Kirchmanns’ kitchen.

  “Lieselotte! What in the world?” Frau Kirchmann needn’t have pulled me into her arms; I nearly bowled her over. “What is it? What’s happened? Where is Marta?”

  “Frau Bernstein—they’re emptying her street. Rehousing—I don’t know where.” I blubbered and blubbered, not even sure she’d understand me.

  “It’s started, then.” She held me close. “We’ve heard rumors.”

  “You knew? You knew they would take her away? Why didn’t you tell me?” I all but screamed.

  “Calm yourself, be quiet! They’ll hear you in the street.”

  I moaned, swallowing my grief, still crying—afraid for dear Frau Bernstein, ashamed of the terrible fear for myself.

  “We’ll find out if she’s taken—where she’s taken. We won’t abandon her, not if we can help it. Did you see her go?”

  “Nein, nein. I couldn’t see anything. The girl beside me said there would be a clean sweep of the block—even the elderly.”

  “Those who cannot work do not eat,” Frau Kirchmann mumbled.

  “What?”

  “That’s our New Germany’s view of the elderly—Jewish or not, but Jewish most of all.” Frau Kirchmann sat down at the kitchen table and put her head in her hands.

  I’d thought only of my own grief, my pain for Frau Bernstein. But there were so many more in our network. I’d supped with the Kirchmanns often enough to know they ate little of the huge pots of soup Frau Kirchmann made, delivered enough jars and thermoses of soup to be aware. So many friends, so many dear ones, so many strangers. Where were they headed now?

  In this topsy-turvy world, things changed daily. Within days every German Jewish person had been required to wear a yellow star—pointing them out as objects for ridicule and harassment on the street by day, prohibited from every advantage of citizenry at a glance, and making them subjects of persecution by night.

  I’d believed the worst that could happen to Frau Bernstein was that she’d be sent to the Jew house in Berlin. But I was wrong. In late October, she and the Jews from her street were deported—to Poland, as essential workers, promised better food and housing. I did not believe this. Frau Bernstein could barely walk with her arthritic and swollen legs. What work could they send her to do? If she was not worthy of public transportation or medical assistance or adequate rations in Berlin, what would make her deserving of these things in defeated Poland?

  I had just turned sixteen, and I was not stupid. I worked and prayed with the Kirchmanns. At least, I worked. Sometimes I prayed, though I doubted my prayers were heard.

  By day I participated in school and BDM meetings, and heiled Hitler. On Sundays, during church services, I wanted to believe in God, the author of love and mercy. I bowed my head when the pastor prayed. But outside, in the dead of night or on my bicycle runs into the countryside, even though I prayed then too, I believed nothing and no one. I trusted no one.

  Deportations stepped up in November. I couldn’t count the cattle cars or the hundreds of Jews that left from the stockyard. I don’t know where they went, only that they never came back, that no one expected them to come back. Their property, too, was confiscated for the Reich and “Aryanized.”

  Yellow stars, which had bloomed across Berlin overnight, now shrank as the weeks passed. Jews, who’d believed things would surely calm down, surely work out, now sold everything to obtain passports, to have their names added to lists for admission to countries anywhere outside German rule.

  Most could not afford that luxury. Every day, more went into hiding. We could not feed the ones we knew, and that felt like murder. I longed for the nights I used to lie awake, waiting for Rudy or Vater to come in. I counted myself lucky if I made it through the kitchen window, legs muddied and scraped from cycling madly, before Vater stumbled through the front door in his drunken stupor.

  I could not understand Vater. Fräulein Hilde kept him dangling, like a fish lured by luscious bait. One moment he appeared a broken old man, lamenting that she tormented him by demanding he establish himself first, only to declare the next that the hunt was on, that her teasing energized him, as though he’d all the passion of a seventeen-year-old boy in love. He kept away long hours, saying his business had increased thanks to new connections. He authorized builders to modernize and improve our house, and told me to keep out of their way and let them work in peace. All I cared was that he and Fräulein Hilde both seemed to have completely forgotten me and birthday parties and Nazi officers.

  I didn’t realize I should have kept closer watch, that I should not have been so naive.

  The announcement crackled through the parlor radio. Germany had declared war on the United States, days after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor—some Pacific port of the Americans’. I’d no idea what this meant for the weeks ahead, except that the Kirchmanns believed it would draw the war out longer, and that Japan and Germany had foolishly roused a sleeping dragon—an opinion no one dared utter in public. One more worry to add to those that abounded.

  Perhaps it wasn’t right or reasonable, but I pushed those worries aside as best I could and pinned my hopes on Lukas’s coming home before Christmas. Home to his family, home to me. Would he have changed in these three long months?

  Herr Kirchmann received reaffirmation that Lukas’s work was essential to the war effort. He won’t be going to the front! Thank You, God!

  13

  HANNAH STERLING

  JANUARY 1973

  Carl Schmidt waited by his car for me the next morning, ready to renew our tour. But I bore no stomach for touring Berlin, no matter his insistence and unadulterated enthusiasm for “the city’s world-renowned Tiergarten, boasting animals in as near their natural habitats as possible.”

  A respectful audience, I nodded at the loveliness of the pond he pointed to, listening only with my face. All the while my brain conjured pictures of concentration camps and Jews being shamed and beaten, worked to death and gassed—by someone who might have been my father.

  “And the hip bone is connected to the leg bone, and the leg bone is connected to the ankle bone, and they’re all connected to the eye socket. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “What? Oh, yes, yes, of course.”

  Carl s
topped in the middle of the Tiergarten path. “You’ve not heard a thing I’ve said.”

  “Of course I have. I’ve heard . . .” I stopped too. Those raised eyebrows again.

  “I don’t usually have such a poor effect on my clients, especially my feminine clients.” His smile disarmed me.

  “I’m sorry. I’m really not very good company today, Carl. Maybe you should take me back to my grandfather’s.”

  “And lose my employment? I’m under strict orders to help you discover Berlin as the most fascinating city on earth.”

  “You’ve done a splendid job. But I just can’t stop thinking about the reason I came here in the first place, and it wasn’t to see the sights.”

  “Ah, your family.”

  “Yes.” I picked up a stone and cast it into the pond, nearly skimming the ear off a little boy. “Oh, dear.”

  “Those are lethal weapons in the hands of a distracted woman.”

  I closed my eyes. Why couldn’t the world just go away?

  “Do you want to talk about it? Would that help?”

  “It’s too humiliating.”

  “You’re talking to a man who’s grown up with humiliation ground into him.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “It’s true of every German. We’re tainted. The ‘sins of our fathers,’ you know.”

  I knew precisely what he meant. What about the sins of my father? But he’d offered to help, and there was no one else. “I came here because I thought my mother had no family. My mother always claimed to be Austrian, and that all her family died during the war. When I learned I had a grandfather living, I couldn’t believe it, and I couldn’t wait to come, to meet him.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “So?”

  “So, last night I learned that my mother ran away from home.”

  He waited. I turned away, bit my lip, testing the waters to see if I could speak without crying. I tried again. My breath caught. It was no use.

  “Many young people run away from home,” he offered.

  “This was during the war. She got caught up with some radical group.”

  “Your Grossvater told you this?”

  “Dr. Peterson. He’s been the physician of the family forever—Grandfather’s friend and colleague since before the war.”

  “Ah. There were many political groups dur—”

  “He said she ran off, that she shamed the family and hurt Grandfather so he never recovered.” I turned away again, unable to look at him, to guess what he, a modern German who’d come of age after the war, must think of me, of my mother. “I think my mother was a Nazi—probably an extreme Nazi.”

  “Did this Dr. Peterson tell you so?”

  “Yes—well, no, not word for word. But what else could such shame connected with a radical group mean at that time?”

  “You forget that in Germany during the war there was no shame in being a Nazi. There was, in fact, great pressure to join the Nazi Party. Those who didn’t were blacklisted and, if they were vocal in their opposition, sometimes sent away—arrested, taken to camps. If your Mutter—your mother—was part of a radical group, that meant she was in all probability not a Nazi, but opposed to the Nazis. And Herr Sommer, of all people . . .” Carl had become quite animated, almost indignant, but stopped.

  “What do you mean, ‘of all people’?” But I could see that he was struggling with what to say, or maybe how much. “Carl, what do you mean?”

  “This is a family matter. You should ask your Grossvater.”

  “But I can’t talk with him. He speaks no English!”

  “Herr Wolfgang Sommer speaks English. Do not say I told you this, but I know he does. Everyone who knows him admires his ability to speak excellent English. They are playing you for a fool, Hannah Sterling. Shame on you if you let them get away with it.”

  I couldn’t stop thinking of Carl’s words: “They are playing you for a fool, Hannah Sterling.” Why? Why would Grandfather pretend he can’t speak English? So he can study me without committing to me—easier to send me packing when he feels he’s done his duty by me? So I won’t ask questions he doesn’t want to answer? And if Grandfather was ashamed of Mama because she spoke or worked against the Nazis, does that mean he was for them?

  If only I could turn back the clock and see what happened, witness the events that shaped them all. I’d been in Berlin three days and was no closer to solving the mystery of my mother—only compounding the issues.

  And then I thought of Aunt Lavinia and what she’d say: “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.”

  The next morning I listened for Frau Winkler’s steps on the stairs. She’d just put on the coffee and was slicing brown bread from the loaf when I startled her in the kitchen.

  “I’d like to take Grandfather his breakfast when it’s ready, Frau Winkler.”

  Her eyes widened. “Nein, I must help him shave and lay out his clothes.”

  “Is that something you do before or after he eats?”

  “After he eats, of course—”

  “Then I’ll let you know when I’ve finished talking with him.”

  “You know German already,” she mocked. “So soon?”

  “I think we both know that isn’t necessary,” I said softly. “Is it?”

  She turned her back to me, intent on the breadboard.

  “The first night I thought it odd that Herr Eberhardt didn’t translate everything Grandfather seemed to comprehend. And last night Dr. Peterson didn’t even ask him before Grandfather ordered him to show me the library. I came here to learn about my mother, and it seems everyone is playing games with me . . . even you, Frau Winkler. But for the life of me, I don’t understand why.”

  “Old houses don’t give up their secrets easily, Fräulein Hannah. The things that happened during the war—even years before the war—still haunt all of us. The world condemns every man, woman, and child in Germany.”

  She sounded like Carl, but I really couldn’t grasp that in light of people like them. And that didn’t explain the rift in my family. Could there be two different sides to Mama’s story? “You said you were only here for five or six years. How do you know anything about my family before that?”

  “I’ve lived in this neighborhood all my life.”

  “You knew my mother?”

  “Nein. But I remember seeing her. As a child. My family lived in the next block. I was younger.” Frau Winkler wrapped the loaf in a tea towel and set it in the cupboard. “She was very beautiful, with her golden hair and smile . . . turning the boys’ heads as she walked to school.”

  “Did she have a boyfriend?”

  “She paid them no mind. Not until I saw her walk out with her beau . . . her older brother’s friend, I think.”

  My heart pounded against the walls of my chest. “Do you remember the boy’s name?”

  “Nein, I did not know him.”

  “Did he live in this street, or yours?”

  “Nein. I don’t know anything.” She glanced at me, then looked away. “Perhaps your Grossvater knows.”

  I swallowed. To be this close . . . possibly . . . I smoothed my hands over my skirt. “I’ll carry Grandfather’s tray.”

  Frau Winkler raised her brows and poured the coffee.

  I knocked three times on the door.

  “Eintreten.” Grandfather did not sound at all frail, more the authoritarian.

  I pushed open the door. “I asked Frau Winkler to let me bring up your breakfast, Grossvater. The coffee smells wonderful this morning.”

  “Hannah.” His eyes registered surprise as I set the tray on his bedside table.

  “It’s time I started earning my keep, don’t you think?” I smiled.

  He frowned. “Ich verstehe nicht.”

  “Oh, Grossvater, that’s not entirely true, now is it? You do understand. We both know your English is excellent.” My heart pounded, but I stood my ground. He didn’t answer. Momentary confusion, then indignation
, flashed through his eyes.

  I took his hand gently in my own. “I don’t know why you’ve not trusted me. I want only to know you, to have you know me. You’re all the blood family I have now, Grossvater. Please don’t push me away.”

  Hesitation flickered through his blue orbs, but they bored into mine, weighing me in the balance, searching my temper, my mettle. “You are not like your mother.”

  “No? Who am I like?”

  He ignored my question. “She would not be so direct.”

  “Fearful? Shy?” I remembered that about her.

  “Deceptive.” He pulled his hand away. “I do not wish to misplace my trust, not again.”

  “I hope you’ll always have reason to trust me, Grossvater. I want very much to have a good relationship with you. There are so many things I want to know—about you and Grossmutter, about my own mother, my father.”

  He visibly winced. “No good comes from dredging up the past. Even the good cannot be relied upon.”

  “And the bad? Don’t we sometimes need to understand what went wrong so we don’t repeat it?”

  “We learn from experience, this is true. But if the pain is beyond endurance, we cannot—must not—be asked to take it out and examine it. Your Mutter is gone, Hannah. Let her and her deeds rest in peace.”

  “But I—”

  “If your intentions toward me are honorable, if you truly want to reunite our family, you will prove yourself trustworthy and do as I wish.”

  “I do want that, but—”

  “Lieselotte broke the law—the laws of Germany and the laws of my house. I never expected to say her name aloud again. I did not know for years that she moved to America, or until recently that she bore a child. I can only go forward in this life, not back. If this is enough for you, you are welcome to stay here, with me. You will be to me the child I lost.”

  “Grandfather, I—”

  “If this is not enough for you, then you will return to America. I cannot bear another great loss. Do not ask this of me.” His eyes filled and I realized that this man, this German patriarch of my family, had humbled himself to make such a speech. But the promise he required of me was more than I could give.