Saving Amelie (46 page)

Women bordering the group turned away, and Rachel heard one whisper loudly to another, “Well, we didn’t want them anyway. There’s no more rooms, and they eat what little we have. Why couldn’t the Führer send them somewhere else?”

Two younger children from Rachel’s class had wormed their way through the crowd and, following suit, clapped and jeered from the curb. Rachel feared trying to stop the bullying, feared the attention it might draw to herself, but she pushed through the crowd and grabbed the two children’s hands. “You’re going to be late for class, and you know I won’t abide that. Come with me now.”

“But we want to—”

“Now—come!” And she herded the young children into the building.

Why grown people tolerated such cruelty escaped her. But the Hitler Youth were strong, robust boys, and their bullying was nearly encouraged, nearly out of control.

It hurt her heart to see that poor man or any of the senior folks mistreated and demeaned only because their customs were different, their language obscure, their values so simple. It was seeing her father’s theories in action—her father’s theories and Hitler’s realities—and that frightened her most of all.

Jason was right from the beginning. It’s as though we didn’t believe Hitler would do what he said he would. Or was the world simply waiting for someone to step up and do it?
She groaned inwardly. She’d once considered her father’s rhetoric as innocuous as the morning newspaper.
Is my fear, my apathy—indifference—any better than perpetrating evil?

Rachel begged, but Curate Bauer refused to let her help, loath to draw her onto a more dangerous path than the one she already walked.

“Keeping Rivka and Amelie safe, and even yourself and your family, must be your first priority. None of us can save everyone, but we can each do something.”

“But everyone else is doing that for me. Who am I helping?”

“Your grandmother—she needs you. And little Amelie. Prepare her to live in her silent world through sign and self-sufficiency. And Rivka—she has no home, no family, no country.”

Those were not the answers Rachel wanted.

“The point is to live—faithful each day.” Curate Bauer looked as if he were speaking to a child. “And we must prepare and be prepared to go on living. Most of life is not high drama or danger. It is our responsibility to help those around us to live.”

“Be our brother’s keeper—that’s what Friederich says.”

“Or our sister’s.” He smiled. “Sometimes taking up our cross is doing the thing in front of us, not the glamorous, high-risk thing afar off.”

Rachel felt her face warm. She didn’t like being so transparent. It was true that she wanted to do something exciting, something dangerous, something truly rich in self-denial. She wanted . . . and that, she knew, was the problem: it was still about what
she
wanted.

She nodded at last. “That’s what they say Jesus did, isn’t it?”

Curate Bauer’s brows rose. “You understand, then.”

“He probably didn’t think that giving Himself up to be beaten and spit upon and crucified was very glamorous.”

“For our sins. He did it for us because it was what we needed.”

“What we needed,” Rachel repeated. She’d not thought she needed anything or anyone. But now . . . now she wasn’t sure.

In June, as the Germans marched toward Paris, the last evacuation ship loaded with British and French forces left Dunkirk for England’s shores.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill vowed that even if an invasion of England came, the British empire would “carry on the struggle until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”

Rachel could not understand why the United States—her part of the New World—did not enter the fray, why they didn’t step “forth to the rescue.”

Rachel and Rivka lay awake at night in the attic, listening to their forbidden, hidden radio. The BBC reported heavy British bombing in faraway Frankfurt. Rachel hoped the Institute was leveled to the ground. They wondered how long until British bombers would reach Bavaria. Proximity to Munich made them feel like sitting ducks.

Friederich argued that bombing in the Alps was unlikely, that the mountains made finding and hitting targets difficult. “That’s why the Germans are building factories in the mountain valleys and caves—they believe it’s safer.”

But nothing felt safe, and morale in the village waned, especially when letters from soldier husbands and sons did not come, and no casualty lists were posted.

“Hitler’s forbidden the posting or printing of casualty lists, no matter the victories in the field,” Friederich explained. “He doesn’t want us on the home front comparing our losses with the Great War.”

Oma agreed. “The outcry against the war effort could be his undoing.”

But Rachel knew the uncertainty and fear for their sweethearts, husbands, sons, and brothers were nearly overwhelming to those waiting at home, and she pitied them.

By mid-June Rachel had finished reading Bonhoeffer’s book and portions from Oma’s Bible. The characters and their stories, their strengths and many failings, their desperate needs, were not so different from people she’d known—not so different from herself.

To Rachel, the most startling part was Jesus—not only who He was but how He lived until the very end, and how His life was not meant to throw out the Jewish law He was born under—the law that seemed so harsh and severe at first—but to fulfill it. To live within its protection and within its privileges, and to meet its demands for atonement by offering Himself as a sacrifice for all humankind. All of that ran counter to her upbringing—the very idea that the Bible was anything but destructive to human ambition. Sometimes Rachel was thrilled by what she read; sometimes she felt almost as if she was doing something wrong. It was hard to leave behind the voices of her past.

Rachel and Rivka whispered long into the nights, plowing through questions about the law, about the Passion Play, about the quandary of Bonhoeffer’s radical Jesus, as well as his insistence that the church commit to saving the Jews hunted by Hitler.

Rivka claimed she could make no sense of the disparity between Bonhoeffer’s view and the Aryan clause in the German National Reich Church. “Even some Nazis call themselves Christians, but they expel all the Jews, even the ones who believe in their Jesus—the ones who claim Him as Messiah and Savior. It makes no difference that they have become Christians. They arrest them anyway—just like my brother. You can’t believe what those cross wearers say.”

It made no sense to Rachel, either, but she understood the Nazis’
perverted eugenics reasoning. If one was Jewish, it was a matter of blood—inferior blood—not religion. She’d been fed those “facts” from infancy, and it made her sick.

Some nights they fell asleep talking, disagreeing, exhausted by their questions. What did the apostle Paul mean about Gentiles who believed being grafted as wild branches into the olive tree, and what was that about Jesus being the living vine? Did that mean the vine united all—Jews and Gentiles alike? That would fit with the greater picture, but Rivka wasn’t sure. Rachel wasn’t sure.

While Rivka and Amelie slept, Rachel wept over her parents and their too-small world—a world as sad and narrow-minded as the Third Reich’s philosophies.
Father’s arrogance kept him from even imagining that there could be things he didn’t know—possibilities he could not foresee.
She pitied him and was surprised at the stirrings of forgiveness within her heart.

But sometimes, especially in dark moments of weariness or anxiety, the old bitterness wriggled through. Memories of his manipulation and betrayal tore at her stomach, her heart. The process of forgiving had to be repeated.

She wondered, if God really existed, how He did it, day by day, year after year, century upon century—why He never gave up, why He bothered with humankind.

She was on her way home late one afternoon in June, pondering just that question, when Maximillion Grieser and his band of Hitler Youth marched past her toward the beer hall. Since Jason had interrupted his inappropriate behavior in the spring, Maximillion had not patrolled the halls of the school.

The boy beside Maximillion jabbed him in the side as their eyes boldly followed Rachel. Maximillion looked away, but his neck, several shades brighter, betrayed his blush. Rachel pitied him. He’d probably spouted off about being smitten with a teacher, and his friends wouldn’t let him forget. Jason had been hard on him, though
the youth had certainly deserved it. Neither she nor Lea needed that kind of harassment.

She didn’t realize she’d been staring after them, or that Maximillion had turned to watch her. She couldn’t read his facial expression, but smiled self-consciously at the boy, embarrassed to be caught staring. His face lit, and he waved. She waved in return, smiling, glad to put to rest any animosity or shame he might feel. She turned away, idly hoping he’d not misinterpreted her greeting. It was nothing.

It had been quite a day for Maximillion. He’d participated in his first vandalism at the direction of the Gestapo when a local shopkeeper was accused of handing out provisions without the proper ration stamps.

The shopkeeper, beaten and arrested, had begged for mercy along with her daughter. But pity was not the Gestapo’s concern, and it should not be Maximillion’s, according to his Youth leader, who’d helped the boys drown any qualms by taking them on a drinking binge.

The first tankard of beer had helped Maximillion remember that consequences suffered by lawbreakers were their own responsibility and had nothing to do with him. The second tankard helped him forget the woman’s split lip, her bruises, her daughter’s tears and pleas. The third had reminded him why he so enjoyed looking at the beautiful Frau Hartman—and that lifted his spirits and ambitions immensely.

He wondered why he’d ever stopped pursuing her, why he’d paid any attention to the overbearing American correspondent. After all, who was he? Frau Hartman clearly thought well of him, and he of her. But the newspaperman was a nobody, and gone.

The difference between Maximillion’s age and Frau Hartman’s was not so very great. Her husband, though a war veteran, was little more than a cripple. If anything, Maximillion decided he’d wasted valuable time where the beautiful young Frau was concerned.