And After the Fire

by Lauren Belfer

  Optimists didn’t slip away in the dead of night. On the other hand, perhaps optimists did slip out in the dead of night. Maybe Ernst wasn’t really an optimist. Maybe he was a naïve coward.

  No—Gertrude caught herself. She might be a cynic, but she loved him. She’d loved him from the first moment she saw him, over cocktails here in the home of her parents. Her brother had invited him. The two young men were at university together. Her brother had died of pneumonia before that year was out, but as if in his honor, Gertrude and Ernst had had a good life together. Although their son, Gustav, hadn’t lived to share it.

  Some months ago, Gertrude had heard the phrase pet Jew whispered behind her back, literally behind her back, on the street. That’s exactly what Ernst was to his dear friend Stefan Rukeyser. Most likely Stefan had protected them, while he could. She would credit him with that. Here they were, still living in this large house, undisturbed from day to day. Gertrude remembered summer dinners on the terrace with Stefan and his wife, Monika . . . dinners long ago, when pets were dogs or songbirds, not Jews. The last time Gertrude saw Monika, who happened to pass her in the market square (when Jews were still allowed to shop in the market square), Monika had looked through her as if they’d never met.

  This afternoon, after Ernst left for the long walk to the Rathaus, Gertrude, cynic that she was, had decided to prepare for the worst. She’d packed some personal items . . . extra pairs of eyeglasses, good walking shoes, double-knit sweaters. She felt certain that where she and Ernst would be going, these would prove to be more valuable than, say, books that had once belonged to Goethe (several were still on the shelves). Gertrude had always heard that diamonds were the currency of last resort, so on the principle of hiding in plain sight, she’d taken her diamond necklace, earrings, and brooch out of the safe, and these she would wear tomorrow. She’d practiced the lines, These old things, real diamonds? Take them, if you think so. The thought of saying this to an SS officer was strangely satisfying, whether he fell for the trick or not.

  As to the other items in the safe—stock certificates, deeds, testaments—what did any of it matter now? She’d left it all. Except for one item, precious to her father.

  Thinking of him, wondering if she’d done right, Gertrude felt moved to reminisce. She’d grown up in this house. She and Ernst had returned after Gertrude’s mother died, to give companionship to her father in his final years. He had been a wonderful man, an amateur violist as well as a physician. In his twenties, he’d spent time in Berlin pursuing advanced medical studies. He’d had many adventures there, before marriage to Gertrude’s mother, his childhood sweetheart, brought him back to Weimar. He enjoyed sharing his memories with Gertrude when they relaxed together during long summer evenings on the terrace. He’d even played the viola at the home of Paul Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, brother of Felix.

  Herr Mendelssohn-Bartholdy had given to her father what became his most valued possession, an original manuscript of choir music by Johann Sebastian Bach. This was kept in the safe because of something disturbing about it that her father for some reason refused to discuss. Gertrude had looked through it several times over the years. Truth be told, she had no interest in J. S. Bach or in classical music, despite her parents’ efforts to force her to play the piano when she was a girl. The text of this old manuscript had always appeared, to her, to be mostly illegible gibberish.

  Now, however, she wished she’d had the foresight to sell the manuscript when doing so would still have been workable for her. Her father had made her promise never to sell it, and she had kept her promise. She’d fallen victim to pointless sentimentality. The manuscript might be worth a fortune. Enough to buy their way out of the country even now. If Ernst could be convinced to leave the country, which he couldn’t be.

  Continuing with the principle of hide in plain sight, she’d put the manuscript into the piano bench along with her father’s viola music and the sorry-looking volumes her piano teacher had used when attempting to instruct her. Sharps and flats, scales and arpeggios, legato and staccato—what did she care? Her parents had despaired of her . . . until one day at school a microscope was placed in front of her, and she’d discovered an endeavor she cared about very much indeed. Her father had encouraged her to study medicine, and he’d never wavered in his confidence in her.

  Yes, stashing a valuable music manuscript in a piano bench was the right and proper course.

  While they were away (even she succumbed to reassuring euphemisms on occasion), she would turn the house over to Lena, their housekeeper. She’d already given Lena what money remained in the safe. Lena had been with Gertrude ever since she and Ernst married. Lena would care for everything, with her granddaughter Eva to keep her company and assist her.

  “Gertrude?” Ernst was calling to her. “Darling?”

  “Out here,” she replied. “On the terrace. Make yourself a drink and join me.”

  They had only water, but they followed their usual routines.

  Twelve-year-old Eva Reinhardt sat down on the edge of the terrace and reached for a stick. With her back to the Genslers, she peeled off the bark. She always tried to be on the terrace in the evening, when the clouds turned lavender over the valley. Grossmutter Lena said Eva wasted too much time studying clouds, but she said it with a smile, which told Eva that she could do it so long as she didn’t call attention to herself. Lena had two rules that had to be obeyed absolutely: washing hands before meals and not talking to strangers, especially Jews and gypsies. The Genslers were Jews, but they weren’t strangers, and they were also gemütlich, so they were an exception.

  Lena also had a rule of not talking about the fact that she worked for a Jewish family, or that she and Eva lived in rooms in the Jewish family’s attic. Lena was old, and had worked for the Gensler family for so many years, she had very special permission from the town to continue working for them.

  “I spoke to Stefan,” Eva heard Herr Gensler say. “He told me everything will be fine. We’ll be sent to a simple but comfortable place. Many of our friends will be with us. We have nothing to fear. He’s given me his personal guarantee.”

  “And you believed him?” Frau Gensler asked.

  “Of course I believed him.” Herr Gensler sounded surprised by the question. Shocked, even. “Stefan has never lied to me. Not in forty years has he lied to me.”

  “I don’t suppose he offered to hide us in his cellar.”

  “Don’t be absurd. Why would he do that, when he knows we’re going to an agreeable refuge? He’s offering us better protection. Bohemia. Theresienstadt. He’s heard from colleagues who’ve been there that it’s like a spa town. You know how lovely Bohemia is, especially at this time of year, and the spa towns are especially beautiful. Karlsbad, Marienbad. Theresienstadt isn’t all that far from Prague. Who knows, maybe we’ll be able to go on sightseeing excursions. I thanked Stefan.”

  Eva liked Herr Gensler because he taught her to play chess in the evenings after dinner. A half-hour lesson, followed by an hour of play. Twenty-three days ago, she’d played him to a draw. This was her best score so far. She’d never beaten him. I won’t let you win, Fräulein Eva, simply to make you happy, he’d told her at the beginning of their lessons. So when she played him to a draw, she knew she’d really done it.

  A long time ago, when Eva was younger, Herr and Frau Gensler used to go out in the evenings. But not anymore. Frau Gensler said there wasn’t anywhere they were allowed to go. Herr Gensler filled the evening hours by teaching Eva chess, while Frau Gensler read books. He was a nice man, even though his clothes smelled of mothballs.

  “No, no need to hide,” said Frau Gensler. “And Stefan has never told a lie.”

  Every two weeks, Eva and Lena went to the Rathaus and reported to a man there everything that happened at the Gensler house . . . who came to visit, where the Herr and Frau said they were going when they did go out, and interesting conversations, like this one. Each time, the man gave Eva half a bar of Milka chocolate and Lena an
envelope filled with money. Lena was happy to help, and so was Eva. It gave Eva something to do when she wasn’t in school, and she loved chocolate.

  “These are honorable men that we’re dealing with. Not the Nazi riffraff. Stefan has given his guarantee.”

  “Stefan is a party member.”

  “Because he’s working for justice from within.”

  The clouds on the far side of the valley were pink now.

  “Was he wearing a uniform?”

  “Of course he was. He serves his country. Our nation is at war—as you well know. But that doesn’t mean he agrees with the riffraff.”

  Herr Gensler was an important man. Books he’d written, lined up in order of size, filled a special shelf in his study. Frau Gensler didn’t permit anyone else to dust them. Only herself. He’d served in the war before Lena was born, and he’d been given two medals that he kept in a display box on his desk.

  “If all the good people leave, who will be left to rebuild?”

  The sunset breeze picked up, and Eva felt a chill on her arms. She spread her arms wide, to feel it all over.

  Frau Gensler said, “You’re such an idealist.”

  “If idealism means working toward a better future, then yes, I’m an idealist and I hope I never stop being one.”

  “Ernst, why don’t we leave right now? This moment. We’ll start walking toward Switzerland. How far can it be? If we’re arrested along the way, we’ll probably end up in the same place they’ll be sending us tomorrow anyway.”

  This was a conversation the man at the Rathaus would especially like to know about.

  “Dearest.” Herr Gensler sounded amused. “All these years, and I still love you. Do you realize that?”

  Frau Gensler waited before answering. “Yes.” She sounded sad. “I do.”

  “Eva, come into the kitchen,” Lena whispered behind her, startling her. Lena never shouted across the terrace. Never disturb the Frau and Herr, that was another rule. “Wash your hands. Set the table.”

  Eva rose. Don’t dawdle. Every evening, Eva set the table for the Frau and Herr’s dinner whether Lena had found food for them or not. As long as we can boil water, we can pretend to have soup—Frau Gensler had said that once, and the man at the Rathaus had laughed when Eva told him. Lena always found food for Eva.

  When Eva had first come here to live, there’d been three servants plus two girls who visited each week to wash the clothes, towels, and bed linens. Lena did everything in the house now: shopping, cooking, serving, cleaning, sewing, laundry.

  And she, Eva, was busy, too, helping with chores, playing chess, going to school, and listening to other people’s conversations.

  As Eva obediently rose and went into the house, Frau Gensler turned to watch her. Such an unusual girl. Gertrude recognized that something was not quite right about Eva, but the girl did well in school, and hopefully she would grow out of the obscure lack of connection that Gertrude sensed in her. Gertrude didn’t dare perform a physical examination of the girl, in case Eva mentioned it at school. A Jewish doctor and an Aryan patient—not permitted in the nation of Beethoven, in the town of Goethe.

  Ernst went inside to change for dinner. Gertrude, who’d changed earlier, stayed on the terrace. They maintained their standards, no matter what Lena had or hadn’t scrounged for their dinner. Gertrude knew that Lena concealed food for Eva, but it was proper that the young should thrive at the expense of the old.

  How calm she felt, when tonight she should feel anything but calm. She would have expected herself to feel desperate, panicked, anxious. Instead she felt serene.

  Her last evening in her beloved home. No doubt by tomorrow evening some Nazi grandee would be ensconced here with his wife and children and food and drink in abundance. So long as they took care of the house, and kept Lena on, Gertrude would be grateful.

  She promised herself that when she reached her end, she’d fill her mind with the view across this green and shimmering valley.

  Chapter 45

  In the distance, the Harz Mountains glowed in the summer sunlight. Wildflowers grew along the barbed-wire fencing. Dan heard the roar of the wind in the trees and the sound of birds, singing.

  He and Susanna had passed through the gates into Buchenwald.

  The plateau before them held several stone structures and dozens of gravel rectangles, commemorating the barracks that once had stood upon them. The camp had held 250,000 prisoners during the war years. Communists and other political prisoners, Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Russian prisoners of war, American prisoners of war who happened to be Jewish . . . forced to be slave laborers in nearby armaments factories. More than 50,000 had died here, from starvation, disease, execution, and other causes.

  Birdsong must have filled the air in those days, too, Dan thought.

  Ever practical, Susanna studied a map of the camp. “I think we should visit the crematorium first. It’s over there.”

  She led the way.

  Too soon, they stood before the six ovens of the crematorium. The guidebook explained that the ovens were made by Topf & Sons, a company based in the nearby town of Erfurt. This firm also supplied the ovens for the crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau. During the war, repairmen were called in regularly. Unlike Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald had no gas chambers for mass murder. Nonetheless, dead bodies had piled up, more than the ovens could easily accommodate.

  Fresh white roses were strewn at the base of each oven. Dan knew that white lilies at Easter symbolized the resurrection of Jesus, but he didn’t know what the white roses meant. They could be a symbolic link to the White Rose group, the students in Munich who had distributed anti-Nazi leaflets and were captured in 1943 and murdered for their courage. White roses, a symbol of resistance. Who had brought the roses and left them here?

  Now Dan and Susanna stood in the cellar, where corpses had been stored at busy times. The corpses were put onto a makeshift elevator for transfer upstairs to the crematorium. Although the cellar was empty now, Dan had seen photographs and could imagine the stacks of corpses, bones protruding, the living turned into skeletons long before death. He felt sick from the horror of it.

  Now they were in a room filled with meat hooks. Thirty-one meat hooks, for torture and murder. Roughly one thousand prisoners had been killed on the meat hooks, according to the placard on the wall.

  Again, fresh white roses, strewn across the floor. Dan looked at Susanna, as she looked at this. She seemed to have become a mask of herself, and he couldn’t read her.

  Now they stood outside a room that looked like a standard doctor’s examining room, with a table for the patient to lie down, and glass-fronted cabinets holding bandages and other implements of healing, circa the 1940s. On the explanatory placard, Dan read that this was a reconstruction of an actual room that had existed in a different part of the camp complex.

  A yardstick for taking the patient’s height was painted onto one wall of the room. This measuring device, however, was hollow in the middle, with a slit big enough for a pistol butt. Around the back of the doctor’s examining room was a kind of closet. In this closet, during those years, a soldier stood and shot the patients through the slit as they were being measured. Blood must have been everywhere. Maintaining the charade that this was an actual medical examining room would have been impossible. The setup must have been an SS officer’s idea of a joke.

  Here, too, in this sad closet, was a rose. A single white rose in pity or forgiveness for the man who stood in this booth and pulled the trigger, killing other men, some who might even have believed that their height was being measured. As many as four hundred men a night were murdered this way, according to the placard. Dan wondered if the gunman received special rations for doing this job, or if he was drunk when he did it. Dan wondered, too, if the gunman saw his victims’ faces through the slit. Maybe he was only a teenager, like Dan’s student Derrick.

  As Dan looked at the single rose on the floor, he remembered reading that Ger
man troops were permitted not to take part in mass murder. The idea that they had no choice, that they’d be killed if they refused, was a myth, a piece of postwar propaganda. Dan had read that SS commanders urged their subordinates to rely upon their reason to overcome any involuntary emotional revulsion to such killing, and to focus on the fact that they were helping the German nation. Those who still couldn’t bring themselves to do it, because of their too-sensitive natures . . . their decision was regrettable but tolerated.

  And the roses . . . maybe the roses indicated a quest for God’s grace. Hans and Sophie Scholl, the leaders of the White Rose movement, were devout Lutherans.

  Mache dich, mein Herze rein . . . The strains of this most profound and consoling aria from the St. Matthew Passion by Johann Sebastian Bach came into Dan’s mind, as he stared at the white rose upon the floor and thought of Hans Scholl and Sophie Scholl, offering their lives to resist tyranny—as if good could, in fact, triumph over evil because good people wished it so.

  Nonsense. Tanks defeated evil, not white roses.

  How could anyone believe in an all-loving, all-powerful God after seeing Buchenwald?

  Bach was convinced of the presence of God. Or at least his music was. Bach, however, had not known Buchenwald.

  The music continued within him, filling the emptiness and posing a spiritual conundrum Dan couldn’t resolve.

  They were outside again, gazing toward the valley, ravishing in its beauty. The day was cool and clear, the breeze refreshing. The music playing in Dan’s mind had ceased. He heard only the wind and the birdsong.

  He watched Susanna as she studied the long gravel rectangles where the barracks had once stood. This was a sanitized version of reality, deserted, lonely, windswept. Her uncle, Henry Sachs, had witnessed the aftermath of the actual crime, the camp teeming, looking like a multistoried town, the prisoners starving, many naked or wearing only tattered clothing, a community of beings clutching at life.