Ashes (21 page)

It is odd how quickly feelings and perceptions can change. Like shadows that stretch longer in the dwindling hours of the day, the one of Hitler had cast us into a long, steadily darkening afternoon. But every once in a while there would come a perfect moment, like a gleam of sunlight that gilded our lives. Right now was one of those moments as Mama and Ulla played “Greensleeves” and Baba sang. I thought again of that moment on the lake with Uncle Hessie, Papa, and Einstein. If only these two moments could last forever.

Men write many fine and plausible arguments in support of monarchy, but the fact remains that where every man in a state has a vote, brutal laws are impossible.

-Mark Twain,
A Connecticut Yankee
in King Arthur's Court

 

 

 

 

W
e did not return to school until the middle of January. Fräulein Hofstadt swirled into class looking as if she had just come off the set of
TheHoly Mountain
or one of the other fabulous mountain movies. These films always featured the great outdoor landscapes of Germany or Austria with beautiful, vigorous blond actors and actresses skiing or climbing up peaks.

She was tanned, her hair a few shades lighter, and she seemed brimming with enthusiasm and anticipation for the “extraordinary” second term of school. We would be reading
Hamlet,
and in fact that was to be our spring play. In a few weeks, casting for the roles would begin. It seemed to me like an odd play to be putting on in an all-girls' school. But logic seemed to have little to do with it. When Anneliese Freiborne questioned how any girl could ever play Hamlet, and of course all the other male parts, Fräulein Hofstadt seemed taken aback. She launched into a spirited lecture on how Hamlet was the quintessential German warrior, which of course had nothing to do with the issue of girls playing male parts.

I raised my hand. “But Fräulein Hofstadt, I don't understand. I thought Hamlet was supposed to be melancholy and indecisive.”

“That is the old interpretation. We must look between the lines when we read
Hamlet
and understand the play in a new way.”

I found that
Hamlet
would be the least of my problems.

After school that day Rosa and I passed a newsstand and saw a two-inch-high headline. HITLER'S PARTY WINS BIG IN LIPPE!

That the Nazis had won a parliamentary election in Lippe, a small state in central Germany, far from Hitler's native Austria to the south, was alarming to say the least. But Rosa quickly noted which paper we were looking at. “Look it's the
Völkischer Beobachter
.” The People's Observer was the official paper of the Nazi Party. Not one of the other papers on the newsstand appeared to have any mention of this “Big Win.”

Rosa and I parted ways at the corner, for she had a doctor's appointment and I continued back home. When I approached our building, Herr Hölle practically danced through the door to greet me, holding a copy of the
Völkischer Beobachter
in his hands. I stopped and looked at him hard. I wanted to say something, but I was frightened and the words became tangled in my brain. So I just shook my head, looked down, and stomped through the door. He began whistling the “Horst Wessel Song” as I passed, and the only thing I dared do was clamp my hands over my ears. He laughed at me. So I could now add item number eight to my Diary of Shame.

1. SA officer on Kurfürstendamm

2. Beer garden in Caputh when boy sings “The Watch on the Rhine”—K's eyes

3. U doing it with K

4. K's spitting in our basin; K's toothbrush

5. “Heil Hitler” in the alley; alley dream. Paint squad boy

6. Baby Hitler naked on mother's fat shoulder

7. Accepting invitation to Christmas tea with Fräulein Hofstadt after spying on her

8. Didn't have the courage to call Herr Hölle a complete shithead.

And then I wrote this in my diary:
I am completely gutless. Why couldn't I say something? I wanted to say he was lower than low, that his stupidity was mind boggling; that if Hitler won, the rest of the world would think of us as scum. Why did the words become all mixed-up for me? Am I such a perfect German child that I dare not say anything to my elders even when I know they are morally wrong, monstrously immoral? I am pathetic.

 

 

The news about the Nazis' big win in Lippe did make it to the radio. I heard it blaring from Papa's study as I came into the apartment. Hertha was lingering outside the study with her dusting cloth, taking a very long time to polish the hallway credenza with its old pieces of family silver. A very slight smile played across her usually impassive face. I walked by her and entered the study. My parents looked tense, but as soon as I came in they affected an almost overly casual manner.

“Lippe,” I said. “That's bad, isn't it?”

“Nonsense!” my father said dismissively.

“It means nothing,” Mama said. “Nothing at all. It's a tiny state. The total vote was ninety thousand and Hitler only got thirty-nine thousand of that.”

A half hour later we were having tea in the music room when the telephone rang. Hertha came in to say that Frau Blumenthal was calling. Mama went to speak to her. When she returned, she looked slightly worried.

“Baba says that for some reason this win in Lippe, though not much, impressed some of the men behind the Old Gentleman.”

“Chancellor Schleicher?” Papa asked. “Did it impress him?”

“She didn't say.” Mama cocked her head. “You know, that is odd, she didn't mention him. And now that I think about it, she seemed . . .” Mama hesitated. “She seemed rather guarded on the phone.”

“Baba needs to be a little more guarded. I worry about her,” Papa replied.

“You mean because she's Jewish?” I asked. Papa looked at me. There was that gray, sad mist in his eyes that I had never seen until this past year.

“Yes, because she's Jewish,” he answered.

“But Papa, I thought you said Lippe didn't count for much.”

“It doesn't.” He paused. “But these are just not good times.”

“Don't worry her, Otto,” Mama said.

This angered me. “Mama, don't talk like that. First of all, I am here in the room. You don't have to say ‘her' when I'm right here. Secondly, I'm not a baby.”

“Don't speak to your mother that way, Gabriella.”

I closed my eyes. So would this be item number nine? I have the guts to speak to my mother rudely but not Herr Hölle? I went to my room to study before dinner.

 

 

It had begun to drizzle and then a wind from the west side of the city came, which always seemed to swirl up old leaves from the courtyard garden below, and now rain-splattered leaves were flattened against my window. I noticed, however, some smeary colors against the pane that were hardly from nature. I went over to the window to examine what was stuck there more carefully. An envelope! My windowsill letter to Christkindl? After almost three weeks?

But it was not my letter. It was Ulla's. The sugar and the colored inks had smeared until it was barely legible. The only word I could make out was
freund
, friend. And then it looked as if she had written the words “help me,” but I couldn't really tell. There were many other illegible words on the paper. I wasn't sure quite what to do with it. One was not really supposed to read another's windowsill letter. It was private, for Christkindl. But I didn't think I should return it to Ulla, either. So I tore it up into very small bits, and put it in my trash bin.

 

 

A week later we were sitting at our dining table with Uncle Hessie and Baba for dinner when the telephone rang. Hertha came into the dining room looking quite agitated.

“I am sorry to interrupt, but it is a call for Frau Blumenthal.” The color rose in Hertha's face and her eyes sparkled fiercely. “It is the chancellor's wife, Frau Schleicher, calling and she says it is urgent.”

“What?” Baba looked as stunned as the rest of us. She got up automatically and followed Hertha to the kitchen. Elisabeth von Schleicher was an old friend of Baba's but that she should call her here at our house seemed strange.

Two minutes later Baba returned. She seemed to be in some sort of a trance. She stopped at Papa's chair and looked down at him. Her lips trembling. “Otto, you were right.”

“Right about what, Baba?”

“The Old Gentleman—he is so weak. He is getting sucked in. Hindenburg's son, Oskar, went with Hitler to von Ribbentrop's for a meeting.”

“What?” Papa said.

“This can't be good!” Uncle Hessie said, starting to rise from the table.

I thought I had heard this name before—von Ribbentrop. He was a Nazi. He was perhaps like the steel millionaire Fritz Thyssen whom the newspapers sometimes called Hitler's banker. Perhaps von Ribbentrop was another source of money for Hitler, I wasn't sure.

Mama put her hand out and touched Hessie's arm gently. “Sit down. What can you do?” Suddenly I noticed the color had drained from Ulla's face. Beneath her eyes was a greenish tinge. She jumped up from the table. “I feel sick,” she said as she ran out of the dining room.

Mama turned to me. “Gaby, go check on Ulla.”

There wasn't much to check on. Ulla was on her knees throwing up into the toilet. She waved me out with one arm. “Out! Out! I'll be fine. Just something I ate at lunch.”

“You sure?”

“Yes, I'll be fine,” she said. I shrugged and walked away.

When I returned to the table, Mama asked me how Ulla was.

“Fine, just something she ate earlier today.” I looked around. “Who's this von Ribbentrop man?”

Baba sneered. “A wine merchant who married money and paid for his title. Thus the ‘von.' His wife makes Lady Macbeth seem like a pussycat. Horrid woman. But he's always been there behind the scenes for Hitler, ready with the money. He paves the way for him.”

“Yes, right to the coffers of the biggest industrialists in Germany,” Hessie added.

“But what can Ribbentrop do for him now?”

“Why would Hindenburg? . . .” Papa and Mama were both talking at once.

“It's the Osthilfe scandal,” Hessie said.

“It's bribery!” Papa fumed.

“Wait! Wait!” I held up my hands almost shouting. I was completely frustrated. I had no idea what this scandal was, but I sensed it was important.

“What's in God's name is the problem, Gaby?” Papa exclaimed. “We don't shout at the dinner table.”

“Yes, we do!” I said heatedly. “I don't understand a thing you are talking about except that it's all bad. You think someone is paying so Hitler can be chancellor? Is that it?” No one answered.

“I know the Nazis have a lot of seats, but they don't have a majority because no one does. So I don't understand. It's a democracy, isn't it? But now it's like they are changing the rules. You can't change the rules in the middle of a game. It isn't fair.”

Everyone looked down into their plates of uneaten food. No one answered.

“Is it?”

I felt something collapsing in me. No, not just in me. I looked around the table at everyone's faces. It was that sensation again, not of a vacuum, but of the black hole of a dying star with a gravitational pull so strong nothing would escape. Not even light.

Mr. Walters fell to “showing off,” with all sorts of official bustlings and activities. . . . The librarian “showed off”-running hither and thither with his arms full of books. . . . The young lady teachers “showed off.” . . . The young gentlemen teachers “showed off”. . . . The little girls “showed off” in various ways, and the little boys “showed off” with such diligence that the air was thick with paper wads and the murmur of scufflings. And above it all the great man sat and beamed a majestic judicial smile upon all the house, and warmed himself in the sun of his own grandeur-for he was “showing off,” too.

-Mark Twain,
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

 

 

 

 

S
o this was how the chain worked. These were the links. First there was the black limousine with the hand mysteriously opening the door and Fräulein Hofstadt getting in. Next, Papen's resignation as chancellor in early December. Then Schleicher becoming chancellor. Einstein leaving Germany for good. Papa's prediction that the Old Gentleman would be sucked in. Then on January twenty-eighth, after fifty-seven days as chancellor, von Schleicher resigned and yes, it happened—January thirtieth, the Old Gentleman finally gave in and asked Hitler to form a new government. At this point, the Austrian corporal, a corporal no more, became chancellor. And thus began the first link in a new segment of the chain. The segment that would become the Third Reich, the name for the totalitarian dictatorship under Hitler that was supposed to last for one thousand years.

 

 

It was Tuesday, January thirty-first, the first day of school after Hitler became chancellor. Rosa and I walked into the classroom and sat at our desks as usual. Fräulein Hofstadt jumped up. No, it would be more accurate to say that she exploded from her chair and raised her right arm at an angle from her chest, the palm of her hand down. “Heil Hitler!” she shrieked. And guess what? I jumped up with the rest of the class and raised my arm as well.
This
was item number nine in my Diary of Shame.