A Master Plan for Rescue: A Novel

by Janis Cooke Newman

  In those years the struggle that was going on in the Reichstag—the German government—between the Communists and the Nazis was also taking place in the streets. But in the streets, instead of words, it was being fought with rubber truncheons and lead pipes, and also with bullets. It was this fight that Pietr went out to photograph, and I never knew how he did not come back with more cuts and bruises than he did. Could not figure how he did not come back with his precious American newspaperman’s camera smashed into many pieces.

  I had watched Pietr walk straight into a band of SA men who were throwing bricks through the windows of Jewish-owned department stores in the Leipzigerstrasse—because in their minds Jews and Communists were the same thing. Seen him photograph these same SA men as they smashed more bricks into the faces of any passersby whose features they thought too Semitic. When a riot erupted between a group of Nazis and Communists in Hallesches Tor, right around the corner from our flat, rather than stay inside the way any sane person would, Pietr grabbed his American camera and ran out, capturing the streams of blood that ran between the cobbles. He roamed the streets of Berlin late at night, photographing the bodies of comrades shot in the face and the back of the head, preserving their images before the SA men could drag them away, go back and tell their families they’d been sent to a work camp, or pressed into service in the army.

  Pietr photographed all of it, then hurried back to the darkroom at the Rote Fahne offices because he did not trust anyone else to develop his pictures. Once they were developed, he would follow Herr Brackman, the editor, around, the way a dog will chase after a car it cannot catch, insisting he run every single picture, preferably on the front page.

  “If you show people the truth,” Pietr would tell him, “they will have to look at it.”

  Herr Brackman, hunched from all his years bending over photographs and reporters’ copy, would look at all of Pietr’s pictures. Then he would shake his head and say that he would like to continue publishing his newspaper. And when Pietr repeated his comment about the truth, Herr Brackman would tell him, “If people do not want to see something, they will not. Even if you put it on the front page of a newspaper.”

  Pietr would then gather up his pictures and tell Herr Brackman that neither he nor Rote Fahne deserved his photographs. Herr Brackman would attempt to unbend his spine and nod. “But if you find you’ve changed your mind tomorrow, I would be happy to have you and your photographs.” The next day, Pietr would return with a new batch of photographs, because at least you could count on Rote Fahne to run one or two of your pictures, which was more than you could say for the rest of Berlin’s newspapers.

  I also wound up as one of Pietr’s photographs one afternoon when three SA men in street clothes beat me unconscious on the Kurfürstendamm for the crime of appearing too Jewish. I was one of a half dozen perpetrators of the same crime, all of us lying bleeding on the pavement when Pietr turned up with his camera. He told me he had shot six or seven pictures of my swollen face before he recognized me.

  “You looked wonderfully horrible. I was counting on you for the front page.”

  For once Herr Brackman agreed with him, and to show his appreciation, Pietr treated me to a session behind what he considered the best window on Wassertorstrasse.

  The spring Pietr met Lena—the spring of 1932—was the spring the Nazis killed ninety-nine people in four weeks. It was also one of those unusual soft springs that do not usually come to a northern city like Berlin—an Italian spring.

  I cannot tell you if it was raining on the day they met, but let us say that it was. I can say that they met near the Wassertorstrasse archway, and that it was just before dawn because Pietr was shooting a fight that had begun in a nearby tavern between a gang of Nazis and some drunken Communists. By this time—just before dawn on a soft Italian-like spring morning, with a bit of rain falling—the fight had moved to the Wassertorstrasse archway and the Nazis were not merely trying to beat the drunken Communists to death, they were also trying to kill a couple of policemen who had come to stop the fight.

  Lena, who was neither a Communist nor a Nazi, but—as Pietr would later learn—an anarchist, was trying to get to her job as a seamstress over in the Mitte. A task that was being hampered by the fight outside her door.

  “The moment I saw her standing in the street with her bicycle,” Pietr told me later that morning, “I didn’t care so much about shooting any more pictures.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Maybe it was all that red hair.”

  “Maybe you realized Herr Brackman would not print them.”

  “No,” he insisted, “it was the hair.”

  Using the unnatural luck that had gotten him through countless street battles with only minor cuts and bruises, Pietr strolled through the pipe-wielding Nazis and led the red-haired anarchist to safety. Then—as if forgetting his bag was filled with exposed film—he accompanied her all the way to the factory in the Mitte. Running alongside as she pedaled her bicycle, as she was already late for work—anarchists, as it turns out, are habitually late for work—the Speed Graphic camera bouncing against his side.

  Lena Rubinowitz did indeed have hair that could make you forget what you were meant to be doing. It was red like something set on fire. So thick and full of untamable curls, you knew no matter how deep you sank your hands into it, you would never reach the bottom. Pietr called it anarchist hair and claimed she had only become an anarchist so she would have an excuse for it. This made Lena laugh, as if Pietr was right about this. Although the two of us were also sure that this small, red-haired girl kept a cache of Molotov cocktails stashed under her bed.

  I think this was the reason Pietr loved Lena, that she could laugh when he accused her of playing at being an anarchist. I know it was one of the reasons I was half in love with her. Or if I am being honest, I would tell you that I was all in love with her. Because although I had vowed to fix nothing until after the revolution, I fixed Lena’s bicycle at least once a week. Proving two things, I suppose, my feelings for her and the connection between anarchists and terrible bicycles.

  Because there were two seamstresses who shared Lena’s flat, and so many comrades in ours, it was impossible for Pietr and Lena to be alone. To solve this problem, Pietr would whistle up at one or another of the windows in Wassertorstrasse and pay the woman behind it to spend the evening at the cinema. I think maybe I loved Lena even more for her willingness to visit these small flats without asking about Pietr’s friendship with their owners, and because she always brought a gift of still-warm bread from the bakery near her flat, explaining, “When the bread comes out, the prostitutes are always working.”

  Sometimes Lena and Pietr would take me with them to small underground bars that were the haunts of bohemians and homosexuals—and mercifully, never Nazis—to hear American jazz. Not being a Communist, Lena was free to love things that were American. One night at the Tingle Tangle Club, as Herr Mike Plottnik aus Neu York played saxophone, we drank gin, then watched Lena dance around Pietr’s chair, in an imitation of Josephine Baker’s banana skirt dance. Lena danced like an anarchist, with no design or purpose, letting the sinuous bass notes of Herr Plottnik’s saxophone move her small body around Pietr’s chair like a snake. When the music ended, she threw back her head full of red hair and laughed with more uncomplicated joy than I have seen before or since.

  I am certain Lena knew that I was in love with her. She treated me like a favorite younger brother, bringing me white shirts from the factory where she worked in the Mitte—shirts I am sure she stole—teasing me about girlfriends I did not have. She cut my hair when she decided it was too long. Lena gave the worst haircuts in the world—anarchist haircuts—but I let her keep doing it because I liked the feeling of her fingers in my hair.

  I am certain also that Pietr knew I was in love with her, and I believe it made him happy. For he was a true Communist.

  On New Year�
�s Day 1933, on her way back to the flat she shared with the two seamstresses, after spending the evening with Pietr and me drinking cheap champagne and listening to German-born musicians play American jazz at the Tingle Tangle Club, Lena Rubinowitz was shot dead by an SA man on a bicycle. As he rode away into the gray dawn, the SA man shouted, “Heil Hitler!” to no one in particular.

  We learned about it from one of the seamstresses who had also been on her way home and had seen it happen. She came into the office later that morning with blood on her dress and told Pietr and me together. I do not think she had ever been clear which of us belonged to Lena.

  After the seamstress—whose name I realized I had never known—left the office, Pietr grabbed his Speed Graphic and ran out. I was certain he had gone to look for the SA man on the bicycle, the one who had shot Lena for no reason other than she’d been a Jewish girl walking home on New Year’s morning and he had a gun in his hand he felt like using.

  I wanted to go with him, although I knew we would not be able to find the same SA man. But then, were not all SA men the same? Would they not all shoot a Jewish girl walking home if they had a gun in their hand they felt like using? So what did it matter if we found the one who had shot Lena or we found another one?

  I knew—even while I was thinking this—that it made me as bad as they were. But was I not entitled to be as bad as they were? Who had decided I had to be better?

  The only thing that stopped me from running out of the Rote Fahne office was the fact that Lena had not been mine. She had belonged to Pietr. And so I stayed. Stayed in case something on the presses broke down, which of course it did, not long after lunch. But as I stood before the stilled machinery, trying to picture how it was supposed to work inside my head, all I could see was Lena’s anarchist hair. Red like something set on fire. Red like the blood the SA man had left her lying in. Lena’s untamable hair soaked through with blood. And I could not make myself stop wondering which would be the darker red.

  Young men do not have the words for grief, and Pietr did not give himself time to learn them. Three weeks after the SA man shot Lena, Pietr went to photograph a Nazi rally held outside the Communist headquarters on the Bulowplatz. What I heard later was that fifteen thousand Nazi Storm Troopers stood outside the headquarters building chanting, “We shit on the Jew republic.” The police, who were supposed to keep order, kept the Communists inside by training their machine guns on the windows.

  I heard all this from the reporter who accompanied Pietr. The same reporter who came back to the Rote Fahne office alone and told us that Pietr had been killed, run over by a streetcar.

  “First he hands me that damned American camera,” the reporter said to Herr Brackman, “then he just steps right in front of the thing.”

  Herr Brackman filled the front page of the following day’s paper with Pietr’s photographs of the besieged Communist headquarters on the Bulowplatz.

  But by then, I no longer worked there. After the reporter had finished telling the story about Pietr and the streetcar, I walked out of the Rote Fahne office. I do not know if Herr Brackman expected me back, or if he ever found anyone to repair his unreliable presses, for I never went past that building again, not for all the time I continued to live in Berlin, not even out of curiosity after the Nazis shut down Herr Brackman’s newspaper.

  I went back to the flat on the Wassertorstrasse and packed the clothes I had arrived with, adding the white shirts Lena had stolen from the factory in the Mitte for me. I packed also my copy of Das Kapital, only because it reminded me of Pietr, not because I cared about anything in it. I found a small room in the Kreuzberg, and went door to door fixing things until I had saved enough money to open the shop in Hallesches.

  A few months after I opened it, Otto recognized me through the window.

  “Comrade!” he shouted, bursting through the door. “You must come back to the Wassertorstrasse and eat lung soup with us!”

  “I have had my fill of lung soup.”

  He glanced at my worktable, covered with the inner workings of a radio.

  “Then come and do not eat. Who cares? The revolution needs your talents.”

  “I think I have had my fill of the revolution as well.”

  For five years, I went to the shop near Hallesches and fixed things that were broken and stayed away from politics.

  And now, after so many years, Rebecca wanted me to play politics with Nazis.

  “This game of favors,” I said to her, “it will keep us alive?”

  “And perhaps more.”

  I knew she meant it might provide a way for me to leave.

  “All right, then,” I said, wondering how well I might learn to play it.

  • • •

  The next day I went to the shop near Hallesches and hung a sign in the window printed with the words This shop is closed. Then I sat on the stool at my worktable and opened a book. Toward the afternoon, a young Nazi officer came in carrying a music box.

  “Can you fix this, Jew?”

  I pointed to the sign in the window. “I am no longer in the fixing business.”

  “I hear that you can fix anything.”

  I looked up into the officer’s blue eyes. “I could, when I was in the fixing business.”

  The young Nazi set the music box on my open book.

  “It would mean much to my wife to have it working. It is a family heirloom.”

  I studied the music box. It was made of intricate patterns of inlaid wood and trimmed with gold. I could tell without turning the key that you would feel the sound of it deep in your chest next to your heart.

  “Your wife is from Vienna?”

  “She is from Stuttgart.”

  “Her family, then?”

  “Her family is German. Why these impertinent questions?”

  I nodded my head at the box. “The music box, it is Austrian.”

  The young officer drew back his shoulders. “The Nazi government would consider it a service if you would repair the music box.”

  “The entire government?”

  “Myself, as its representative.”

  I placed a hand on the top of the box, already picturing the mechanism beneath its inlaid wood. “Come back tomorrow.”

  The young Nazi officer turned toward the door.

  “And perhaps as a service to me,” I said to the back of his uniform, “the Nazi government would consider sending you back with half a kilo of stew meat.”

  Without turning, the officer nodded.

  Rebecca was disappointed I had not asked for film for her Leica, and as the weeks went on, I had to promise to make that my request every so often, as well as something more interesting than stew meat and potatoes.

  “If I have to live under the Nazis, I want to drink wine and eat chocolate and smoke American cigarettes,” she said. “And what about a box of meringues for breakfast once in a while?”

  No one except Nazis brought me anything to fix. No one else dared. It was as probable they would be punished if it appeared I was running an unregistered business. I did not pretend this was a good or honorable situation. When Goldman the greengrocer, who had registered his business and then seen it transferred to an Aryan for a minor infraction, called me collaborator on the street, I nodded and agreed with him. I was collaborating with the Nazis by fixing their music boxes and motorbikes in order to save Jewish lives—Rebecca’s and mine. Maybe that was not excuse enough for Goldman the greengrocer, but it was all they had left me.

  • • •

  One day toward the end of September, I came home and found Rebecca curled up in a patch of sun like an elderly cat.

  “I saw Dr. Bauer for the final time today,” she told me. Rebecca had stopped seeing Dr. Lieberman the summer before when it became illegal for Jews to practice medicine, even on other Jews. Dr. Bauer had been a favor called in for a broken o
scillating fan.

  “Is it because your heart is better?” I asked, stupidly hopeful.

  “It is because my heart is not Aryan enough. There is a new law that says Aryan doctors may only treat Aryan patients.”

  My hands were full of film for Rebecca’s camera, and I hurled the package to the floor, wishing now that I had requested a kilo of meat.

  “First they take away our doctors, then they forbid us to see theirs. Is this how they will exterminate us?”

  “It is one of the ways.”

  Rebecca pulled me down into her patch of sunlight. “For me, it doesn’t matter. Jewish, Aryan, unless he is also a magician, this is not something he will fix.”

  “But perhaps he can keep it from breaking down so fast.”

  • • •

  A week later, Herr Gloeckner parked his shiny Peugeot automobile at the front of my shop and strode to my doorway, filling it and his Nazi uniform the way that sausage meat fills its casing. Herr Gloeckner held a sufficiently high rank in the Nazi Party not to bother with the charade of parking his shining piece of machinery around the back.

  “There is a noise, Jakob,” he informed me. “I will return at four.”

  When Herr Gloeckner returned at precisely four o’clock, he instructed me to turn on the Peugeot’s engine. He stood in the street with his surprisingly small head cocked at an angle, as if Wagnerian opera was being played beneath the hood of his French automobile. After wasting a quarter-liter of petrol, Herr Gloeckner declared the Peugoet’s engine returned to its proper smoothness.

  “Of course, as you are forbidden to be in business, there can be no discussion of payment.”

  “That is true,” I said, keeping my eyes on the ground. “Although perhaps Herr Gloeckner’s not inconsiderable influence might extend toward granting an Aryan doctor leave to treat a non-Aryan patient?”

  I heard nothing but the smooth sound of the Peugeot’s engine, saw nothing except my own work shoes. I knew Herr Gloeckner kept a gun holstered at his waist, suspected he had shot more than his share of Jews for only the pleasure of using it. Herr Gloeckner exhaled, and in the sound I believe I heard him contemplating how difficult it would be to find someone else to repair the French automobile.