“Did you call the police?”
Oma wipes her eyes with the handkerchief. “Don’t be naive, Frieda. Where are the police when Nazi hooligans break the windows of Jewish stores and steal everything inside? The police are helpless against the Nazis.”
“But what’s to stop him coming in whenever he wants and taking the money?” Frieda says, alarmed.
Oma shakes her head. “We must be shrewder. I’ve been thinking, Ernst. We will have another place to put the money. We’ll leave a little in the till. But every hour I’ll come empty the cash register and take it to the back. I’ll keep it in the drawer of my sewing machine.”
“He won’t be fooled so easily. He sees the customers buying before Christmas.”
Vati pats her shoulder and stands to go into the dining room.
At dinner that night Luise is uncharacteristically quiet, not mimicking everyone’s sentences the way she usually does. Berta, the maid, is bringing out the chicken and potatoes, setting them down on the table, when Frieda notices tears streaming down the woman’s face.
Oma follows Frieda’s gaze. “Why, Berta! Whatever is the matter?” Oma stands up and puts her arm around the thin woman’s shoulders. Berta is usually silently efficient with no readable emotion on her face.
“Oh, Frau Eisenbaum, it wasn’t my fault!” She weeps in earnest, now that she’s allowed.
“Don’t fret,” Oma says, looking sideways at Vati, who hands over his handkerchief. “Just tell us what happened.”
Berta sniffs into the handkerchief. “Me and Luise were at the greengrocer’s today and I was buying some cabbage and you know the way Luise repeats everything ...” Berta looks around at everyone’s faces. Luise and Wolfie are the only ones eating.
She continues. “The woman behind me in line, she says, ‘That girl’s not normal. She should ...’” Berta swallows. “‘She should be in an asylum.’ She asked our names, so I grabbed Luise and I just ran. She doesn’t know our names so she can’t find us. She can’t do anything.”
“It’s all right, Berta,” Oma says. “You did the right thing. Go to bed and rest now. Frieda and I will serve the rest of the meal.”
Berta’s shoulders stoop as she shuffles back to the kitchen.
“Luise mustn’t go out anymore,” Frieda says. “For her own safety, she must stay home with Mutti.”
All eyes turn to Luise, who has been absorbed in eating some bread. Finding herself the centre of attention, she beams a broad, happy smile, her mouth full of food.
Mutti’s eyes are filled with reproach when she lifts them to Frieda, but Frieda doesn’t care. They all know about the sterilization program the Nazis have initiated for the “feeble-minded.” It has been in the papers. The Nazis make no secret of it. Hundreds of thousands of inmates in asylums have been sterilized against their will after “failing” the highly subjective tests created by Nazi doctors. Questions that were designed to test not only intelligence but moral and social outlook. Questions like: What is loyalty, respect, modesty? What constitutes a satisfactory answer depends on the questioner. And poor Luise can answer only the simplest questions, like her name and address.
Frieda watches her sister eat happily. When she was still in medical school, the professor in her Racial Science class distributed a handout titled The Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases. It began:
(1) i. Anyone who has a hereditary illness can be rendered sterile by surgical operation if, according to the experience of medical science, there is a strong probability that his/her progeny will suffer from serious hereditary defects of a physical or mental nature.
ii. Anyone is hereditarily ill within the meaning of the law who suffers from one of the following illnesses:
Congenital feeble-mindedness
Schizophrenia
Manic depression
Hereditary epilepsy
Hereditary blindness
Hereditary deafness
Oma smiles sadly at Luise. “Your sister is right, liebling. You must stay home.”
“You must stay home,” Luise repeats, lifting a piece of chicken with her hands.
Meanwhile, Jews are continually being arrested into “protective custody.” In the building where the Eisenbaums live, sometimes whole families are taken away, their apartments sealed with tape by the Gestapo so the goods inside will not be looted by locals, but rather by the authorities, who can arrive at their leisure. There’s an apartment like that on their floor, with tape across the door. Frieda avoids looking at it each time she walks by to get to her apartment. The Mundts, a middle-aged couple whose two sons managed to leave for Israel last year. One dawn a few weeks ago Frieda awoke to the stomping of Nazi boots on the stairs, the unrelenting banging on a door. Her heart hammered wildly until she realized the brutes were not pounding at their door, but on one down the hall. She stood with her ear to the front door listening to the Gestapo shouting for the people to get dressed, hurry up, throw the necessities into a small bag, only hurry up, you swine. A moan from Frau Mundt as she was ripped from her home, then a strumming of boots and shoes down the stairs as the couple was escorted out. Then nothing. Silence. Where are they now, Herr and Frau Mundt?
Several weeks later the Eisenbaums have retired to the living room after dinner. Vati turns the radio to some Christmas music, then unfurls his newspaper. Angelic voices fill the air with “Silent Night.” Mutti is reading Dickens’ A Christmas Carol in her favourite chair. Frieda is leafing through her internal medicine book, when a sudden rapping sounds at the door. Everyone jumps, though the knock is subdued, not like the insistent banging of the SS.
Vati approaches the door, but Oma whispers hoarsely, “No! Go to the bedroom. They always come for the men.”
Vati stares at her with disbelief, but retreats while she goes to the door. Wolfie has gone out long ago and is hopefully out of danger.
When the door opens, there is no uniform, but only Irmgard, their former maid, peering behind her.
“Why, Irmgard!” Oma says. “What a nice surprise. Come in.”
Irmgard jumps inside, relieved, it seems, to be out of the hall. She’s wearing a woollen winter coat and a coloured kerchief over her hair. Oma embraces her; Irmgard wriggles out of her arms with embarrassment.
She blushes and stammers, “I’m sorry to come so late, but I was waiting outside until no one could see me come into the building. People kept going by. The streets are busy before Christmas, I guess.”
Vati has come back into the living room and nods curtly at her while Luise runs to her to take her hand.
“I’m sorry, but you know how it is. I’ll be in trouble if someone finds out that I’ve come to see Jews. That’s the way it is now.”
Oma takes a deep breath. “Come, I’ll make some tea.”
“No, thank you. I can’t stay. I’ve come for Berta.”
“What do you mean?”
“She can’t work here anymore.” Irmgard takes a gulp of air; her eyes dart around the living room. “The Gestapo is bothering us. They keep coming to my employer and saying, ‘Don’t you know her aunt works for Jews?’ The family I work for is nervous. They say if the Gestapo won’t stop coming, they’ll have to let me go. They say they’ll find Berta a job if I just come and get her.”
She takes her hand out of Luise’s grip and looks down. “I’m sorry, but I need my job.”
There is a long, awkward silence. Finally Oma says, “Berta’s in the kitchen cleaning up.”
Irmgard nods and steps away from Oma and Luise, avoiding Frieda’s eyes as she heads for the kitchen.
The family can hear Berta’s exclamation at the sight of her niece. Then things go quiet for a moment before voices are raised, first from one woman, then the other. When the kitchen goes completely still, Frieda knows they have gone to Berta’s room and are packing her belongings. Things will be very different now in the Eisenbaum household.
With Berta gone, the duties in the family must be redistributed. At one time i
t would have been Vati who made such decisions, but he has lost that self-assurance that made his word law. The downward spiral of events in his beloved country has softened his voice and brought doubt into his once certain eyes. He seems relieved when Oma and Frieda decide how things must change: Mutti is the only one left who can go to the shops for food. Oma will leave the store earlier to cook dinner and instruct Mutti, who will have to learn the basics of food preparation. (Besides, Oma reasons, what is the point of working her fingers to the bone to turn out more bloomers when Rheinhardt strides into the shop at least once a week in his Nazi uniform and steals the money from the till?) Frieda will help serve dinner and clean up after. Luise will have to stay home and keep out of trouble.
It is bad enough that it falls to Mutti to find food for the family. As it is, Jews are not allowed to shop for food during regular hours. They must scrounge for scraps at the end of the day when the produce has been picked over. Even at the best of times, Mutti would not be good at this job. She is not ingratiating enough to the shopkeepers Berta used to buy from, nor to the grocers who might have saved some vegetables for a handsome woman if she could exchange some pleasantries, maybe show some appreciation. Mutti is not capable of any of that; she would rather live in a book, and so their meals suffer.
Lucky for them, Oma works miracles with what little they can get. Some old cabbage leaves cooked with onions and thickened with a little flour stretch into a satisfying soup. Pancakes are mixed with sliced crabapples from the small stash that was salvaged from the park in the fall and that is keeping company in their section of the cool basement with old turnips, carrots, and potatoes growing graceful little tendrils.
From the articles in the Jewish paper Vati has started reading, it appears that there are a lot of German Jewish women who do not know their way around a kitchen. Frieda notices headlines like “Everyone learns to cook” and “Even Peter cooks.” She doubts that such encouragement will persuade Vati to pick up a mixing spoon.
February 1937
One day in the middle of winter Frieda comes home from the hospital in the evening to find everyone packing. The household has been turned upside down — the drawers of the buffet stand open, some of their contents on the dining table in the process of being bundled up. Pots and dishes clatter in the kitchen as they are moved about.
When Frieda steps into the dining room, Oma looks up from the box into which she is placing some candlesticks.
“What’s happened?” Frieda asks, bewildered.
“We have to move,” Oma says as if it were self-evident.
Frieda has never lived anywhere else. This apartment is the only home she has ever known. She stands transfixed, watching her grandmother.
“We’re moving into the back of the store,” Oma says, reaching for some plates already wrapped in paper. “Don’t look so surprised. You can’t remember this, but we lived there before you were born. We can do it again. If we’re out of here by the middle of the month, the landlord is willing to charge only half the rent. That only gives us five days to get out.”
Frieda begins to sweat. Still in her winter coat, she shivers and her body begins to shake. “I don’t understand. Why do we have to move?”
Oma licks her lips and keeps piling objects wrapped in paper into the box. “The store ... the store is not in our hands. The Nazi Rheinhardt — Scharführer Rheinhardt — came in today ...” She lowers her voice and glances at the doorway leading to the hall. “He just came in, swaggering without shame, and sat down at the cash register as if he owned the place. ‘This is it,’ he said. ‘I’m out of patience.’ Just like that. He told your father we were lucky. That he wanted Vati to still be the boss and run everything, since he was a war veteran, and the brute would give him a pension. A ridiculous amount that won’t even pay for groceries. He said he thought that was reasonable! He didn’t want to be unreasonable!”
Oma’s head shakes uncontrollably. Her hands fly around the box. “We worked so hard to build this business. So many years. And for what?” She looks up to make sure no one is listening. Nevertheless she whispers in a hoarse voice, her hands flying, “Don’t say anything to your father. He’s very upset.”
“But how can he do that, just walk in and take over?”
Oma looks at her with irritation. “Who’s going to stop him? The police? There is no help.”
Frieda ought to know better. Jewish businesses all over Berlin are being confiscated. The broom factory Leopold’s family owned was taken over by a Nazi who used to be a supplier. She, like Vati, had counted on his war record for more protection.
A chill skips down her spine. “But how can we live?”
Oma doesn’t look up. “We must sell everything we don’t need. That’ll keep us for a while. There will be no room where we’re going anyway. The problem is getting a decent price for our things. People know we’re desperate and won’t give us what our belongings are worth. Can’t be helped. We have to take what we can get. There are lots of people in the same boat.”
Oma finally looks up at her, eyes filled with pain. “You have to be strong. Gather together anything you have that might be of value. People will be coming by tomorrow. We all have to do our part.”
“I’m sorry I don’t make more money,” Frieda says.
Oma lowers her eyes again, wrapping some teacups in paper.
Frieda can’t bear to watch Oma and Mutti going through their closets, choosing clothes they can live without. In her room, she fastens a bed sheet over her bookcase so that it hangs down, covering all her medical books. On a piece of paper she scrawls out “Not For Sale” and pins it to the sheet. Frieda makes sure all her medical instruments are in her leather case and walks out the door.
She walks blindly down the familiar streets, through the park where frost glistens on the junipers and brown grass. She has walked this way so many times, always with the knowledge of home in her heart, the safety of going home.
The doctor’s street hasn’t changed. Only she has changed. The very air is vivid, as if her mind is recording it for posterity.
Yes, something has changed. On the front door of the building, someone has written crude letters in white paint: “Jude Raus!”
Inside, she rings the bell near the Krankenbehandler plaque. Herr Doktor Kochmann answers the door with an expression on his face she hasn’t seen there before.
“Liebling,” he says, without the usual affection, peering behind her with anxiety.
“I’m sorry if I startled you,” she says.
“I’m easily startled these days,” he says. “I am waiting for that last knock on the door.”
“No, Herr Doktor. You mustn’t.” Does she mean he mustn’t think such thoughts, or that he mustn’t wait? She doesn’t know. She has never had to give comfort to her old benefactor. It has always been him comforting her. That is why she is here now.
He peers down at the medical bag in her hand. “Are you on your way to a patient?”
“I’m the patient,” she says.
As he leads her inside she sees he has lost more weight, his old brown wool suit hanging loosely on his shrunken frame. She surprises them both when she begins to weep and tell him how they have lost the store. The pension proposed by the Nazi will not go far to support a family of six.
“It’s over,” she says finally. “We barely have enough to live on. They’re selling everything in the apartment.”
He sits down beside her on the sofa, taking her hand. “I’m sorry, liebchen. I’m very sorry.”
“Who would’ve thought ... Remember all those years ago when you came to the store to persuade Vati I should stay in school?”
Kochmann smiles wistfully, nodding.
“Who would’ve thought it would end like this.”
“We are all in the same boat, liebling. At least you are young. You have a chance. Helga and I ...” He shakes his head, glances over to a photo of his wife on the table. A much younger Helga, small and slender, smiles prettily into the c
amera, her hair gathered in a roll over each ear. “I can hardly get her out of bed anymore.”
His eyes are unbearably sad. She throws herself into his arms to comfort him, feeling no comfort herself.
Vati and Wolfie spread the word among their customers and other shopkeepers that the Eisenbaums will be selling their belongings. Like so many others, they have to unburden themselves of their possessions and move to smaller premises.
For the next three days people wander through the apartment examining the furniture, the vases, the curtains with a critical eye.
“Is that a real Persian rug?” asks a woman in a coat with a fox collar.
“Of course,” Oma says.
“I’ll give you forty marks.”
“Outrageous.” Oma shakes her head.
Vulture, thinks Frieda from the other side of the room. The prospect of acquiring cheap valuables has put a sparkle in the woman’s eyes.
“What about the curtains?” The woman forges on, ignoring Oma’s response. “Are they for sale?”
Oma looks up at the velvet curtains and nods. Frieda has never paid much attention to them before but remembers Oma sewing them.
“They’re too long. If you take the hem up, and throw in that painting, I’ll give you eighty marks. Together with the rug, of course.”
Frieda glances at the painting of mountains that has hung on the wall ever since she can remember.
In the dining room Wolfie is negotiating with a customer about some books. “Add a few more to this pile and I’ll take it,” says the stout man with glasses.
He seems to be buying books by the kilo. Not such a bad idea, since there are boxes and boxes of them: books on German history, literature, grammar, books by Goethe and Heine. Mutti has relinquished much of her library, keeping only those books she can’t bear to part with. Unfortunately, these include large volumes like Don Quixote and Oliver Twist, which take up an inordinate amount of room, but there is so little that Mutti cares about that Vati has allowed them. Frieda has told Oma she will part with her clothes before she sells her medical books, concealed behind the sheet hung over her bookcase.
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