Stones From the River

by Ursula Hegi

She told her father she was sure her brother would do whatever he could to help.

  Her father nodded. “Albert is trying to get us out. He knows we’re ready.”

  “And you, Ruth?” her mother asked. “What will you do?”

  “If Fritz were Jewish too, we’d come with you, but he’s so well respected—I don’t think anyone would dare go after his wife.”

  “I hope you are right,” her father said without conviction.

  “We’re careful.” She touched the edge of her chipped front tooth, a habit that made her look like the girl she’d been when she’d jumped from the moving streetcar. “I— I keep out of sight. I mean, Fritz thinks it’s better if I don’t work in the office for a while.”

  “I see,” her father said gravely.

  “Only until things are back to normal,” she said quickly.

  Everyone in the neighborhood was shocked at what had happened to Michel Abramowitz. Frau Weiler prepared a basket of delicacies for them. “They are honorable, dear people,” she said.

  “Those who did it,” Frau Blau said, “they’ll find their own vengeance. They’ll never have any luck.”

  “How could they do this to him?” Herr Meier asked when he parked the bakery truck in front of the Abramowitzs’ house. “They shouldn’t be allowed to,” he said and insisted on leaving four glazed buns and a dozen Brötcben.

  Herr Kaminsky, whose upholstery shop had been overlooked during that night of destruction, said he knew some people among the SA—their wives were customers of his—who were nice, who did not commit any crimes.

  But Anton Immers and some of his friends said it was about time the Jews were shown reality, and when they heard that the mansion of the concert pianist, Fräulein Birnsteig, had not been damaged at all, Herr Immers figured it had to be because it was too far from the center of town.

  The attack on Michel Abramowitz was only the beginning of the violence in Burgdorf, and during the following night—three nights after the first breaking of windows in the city—Burgdorf caught up with a fury. Surely, Trudi thought, the people could no longer pretend they didn’t know what was happening as the stores of their Jewish neighbors were plundered and burned, as Jews were yanked from their beds at night and taken away. Windows that had been forgotten in the initial attack were broken by groups of roaming youths, who were lured by the fires and turbulence.

  It became a show—“Look, they’re getting another Jew”—a theater of the macabre that sucked the entire town onto its bloody stage that night, a night that never was allowed to replenish itself in the folds of its darkness because as soon as the sky reached its deepest hue, it immediately began to pale as if impatient for day. The light, Trudi realized, came from the north, blooming across the sky in an uneven arc. And with it came the smell of smoke.

  She rushed into her clothes, and when she ran outside, smoke curled around her, filling her lungs, enveloping her in a heat that turned November into the hottest month of the year.

  “Wait for me!” Her father was close behind her.

  They cut through their backyard and waded through the icy brook, ran along the back of the Theresienheim and down the strip of grass between the Theresienheim and the school. There, across the street, the synagogue was burning—fast and hot as dried pine cones—spewing yellow sparks into the night. Limbs of fire reached from inside the broken windows, linked, and embraced the large building, crushing its structure.

  Someone started the Horst Wessel song, and several others blared along: “Wenn das Judenblut vom Messer spritzt…”—“When the Jew blood spurts from the knife …” A woman carrying a small child pointed toward the high flames, her smile excited. Two Hitler Youths waved their flags. Trudi looked at the faces of the people around her: most of them she’d known all her life. Maybe now, she thought, now in the blaze of this fire, they surely will have to see. But it was as if they’d come to take the horrible for granted, mistaking it for the ordinary. It made her wonder what would have happened if all of them had gone along with Frau Weiler four years earlier, ranting against the government. Could that have prevented any of this?

  As she listened to the voices of the people, she could hear that some were outraged, but what staggered her was what they were outraged by: the mess and the waste—not the injury to their Jewish neighbors. It shattered their Ordnungsliebe—their love for order—and in the days to come they would agree when Göhring and many other Germans expressed their indignation at the cost of the wreckage and demanded to know, “Wer soll das bezahlen?”—“Who shall pay for this?”

  When the Jewish community was assessed a bill for the debt which arose from the devastation, and was forced to turn over valuables to the government, Leo Montag offered to hold things for his Jewish friends. He’d be glad to store them, he said, or sell them—whatever they needed most for him to do. While Frau Simon asked him to sell a ruby pin and her gold fountain pen, Frau Abramowitz insisted on obeying the law.

  “At least my cameras were already broken,” her husband railed when he found their solid gold candle holders and five sets of his cufflinks missing. “Otherwise you would have handed them over, too.”

  “I don’t want to provoke them any more than necessary,” she said.

  That night, after Ilse was asleep, Michel took the mezuzah from his front door, lined a wooden crate with his old raincoat, and carefully packed the mezuzah along with the silver candlesticks that his parents had given Ilse on her wedding day for the Sabbath candles. After filling the box with other items he considered most precious, he carried it across the street. Outside, the air stank of smoke. Cold and heavy, it clung to his skin. Ever since that night of his arrest, he hadn’t felt clean, not even after he bathed.

  “I want to show you where I’m going to keep this,” Leo Montag said. “In case something happens to us.”

  Trudi held the lantern as the two men followed her down the stairs into the cellar. The light spread the shadow of their collars against their chins.

  Next to the shelves with the preserves, her father hid the box beneath old clothes in a wooden trunk. “You can always get it without asking me,” he told Michel Abramowitz.

  For weeks, the smoke hung above the town, getting into your lungs with each breath, making you cough; and after the rubble was cleaned up, you would still come across slivers of glass far from the areas of destruction as if they’d been carried there by the smoke. You wouldn’t see them unless you’d step into one of them, say, or catch the reflection of a shard of sun in a bare tree limb while reaching up to hang out your laundry in the frosty winter air, making you feel as if you and your neighborhood, the world even, were held in the eye of a splintered mirror.

  twelve

  1939–1941

  IF THE RUMORS HAD BEEN ACCURATE AND THE MIDWIFE HAD, INDEED, been pregnant the day of her marriage to the eighteen-year-old Helmut Eberhardt, hers would have been the longest pregnancy in the history of Burgdorf—perhaps even the entire world, the old women would speculate—because Hilde would not give birth until the spring of 1941, nearly two and a half years after her wedding day. Of course, there would be gossip that she’d had a miscarriage and had become pregnant again before her young husband had left for the Russian front, after extracting from her the promise to christen their first child Adolf.

  Helmut would not even consider that he might have fathered a daughter, and when Hilde would tell him that she’d like to name a girl after his mother, Renate, he would look at her as though she had insulted the Führer and God.

  It was the same look that Helmut had given his mother whenever she had refused to write her house over to him, even though he’d explained to her it was the reasonable thing to do: she could stay in the upstairs rooms, where he and Hilde lived now, and they’d move into the five large rooms on the ground floor.

  “After all, as a widow you don’t need much space,” he had told her the week after his wedding. “While Hilde and I will have a lot of children.” He was determined to convert the gove
rnment’s marriage loan into a gift, and eager for Hilde to earn the Ehrenkreuz der deutschen Mutter. Already he pictured the bronze cross of honor on her dress, to be replaced, of course, by the silver cross and the gold cross as his family grew.

  But his mother didn’t understand. “You are welcome to live upstairs,” she said.

  He pointed to the gleaming parquet floor. “You have to admit that the entire house has been cared for much better ever since I married Hilde.”

  “I don’t ask your wife to clean for me.”

  “She likes to clean.… Why are you so stubborn about the house?”

  “I am too old to live like a guest.”

  In a few years, he would be the same age as his father had been when he’d died. His father had built this house. Surely, his father would want him to live here like a family man, not a son. He gave his mother a winning smile. “You’re not old.”

  But she would not smile back.

  Throughout that winter and early spring his mother resisted his efforts. The house should rightfully be his, he believed. But with him she was stingy, while her generosity toward others was known throughout town: not only did she give flowers to neighbors, coins to beggars, but she also was kind to Jews, even though it was plain enough for everyone to see that they were not wanted in Burgdorf, in the entire country. Couldn’t she read the signs on the streets and in the windows of stores and restaurants? Juden sind hier unerwünscht—Jews are not wanted here. Juden haben keinen Zutritt—Jews are not allowed to enter. Maybe the Jews would finally leave if it became harder to make purchases. Unfortunately, they still could enter some stores, though it was impossible for them to buy rice, coffee, and certain fruits like oranges and lemons.

  To deprive Jews only of the necessities of daily life—Helmut agreed with his friends—was far too kind. Besides, some of the store owners, he suspected, were smuggling groceries to Jewish families at night. It was a direct sabotage of the Führer. But Helmut was watching them. Already, he had turned in one of the farmers, who had promptly lost his vegetable stand in the market, and he was waiting for Frau Weiler to make a mistake.

  Helmut would have liked to see more drastic measures to drive the Jews from the country, a repetition of those exhilarating nights of broken glass; but he had to recognize Göhring’s wisdom that it had been a mess, a waste. Those resources belonged to the German people and would be theirs once the Jews were gone.

  “You’re impatient,” the pharmacist told him, “and that’s good. We need young men like you to remind us that patience can become a terrible habit.”

  Because of his increased political activities, the pharmacist—who still carried the French Jesus around the church square—had curtailed that ritual to the first Friday of every month. Distracted by visions of a different statue—one of his Führer, all in bronze—he enlisted Helmut Eberhardt’s help, and the two went from house to house, cajoling and coercing funds for the monument from even the most reluctant donors. Yet, when the statue of Adolf Hitler was erected in front of the Rathaus, Helmut felt embarrassed. He had pictured it to be at least life size, but it stood no taller than an altar boy, and the pharmacist became very indignant when Helmut asked what had happened to all the money they’d collected. Immediately he tried to apologize for his question while the pharmacist shouted at him that, had he known this would be the thanks he’d get for letting Helmut take part in this glorious project, he would have asked someone more deserving.

  Helmut tried his best to educate his mother to the obvious justice in driving the Jews out of the country and reminded her that the Führer had proclaimed Jews inferior to the German race, and that Jews were responsible for all the hardship because they grabbed power everywhere they could, earning better wages than decent Germans.

  “The Jews in this country,” she corrected him one Saturday afternoon when he followed her into the garden, lecturing her, “are Germans and far more decent than those—those friends of yours who terrorize them—”

  He waved his hands, trying to cut off her words.

  “—or those lunatics in uniforms who consider themselves superior.”

  Goose bumps sprang up on his chest and arms. It was God’s will that the Führer was in power, and to him the two had almost become inseparable. “You could be arrested for saying this.”

  “But this is between you and me, Helmut.” She crouched to pull weeds from around her Dutch tulips.

  “You know it’s my duty to inform on anyone who betrays the Führer.”

  “It is your duty—” His mother stood up and brought her face close to his. “—to be one of those decent Germans you like to talk about. And by decent I mean—”

  “I know. I know. Jew-loving and old-fashioned and critical of the Partei. Don’t you see that each crumb of bread swallowed by a Jew deprives a true German of nourishment?”

  She watched him silently, a fine pulse beating in the hollow of her long neck.

  A chimney sweep passed the garden door, and a knot of pigeons rose from the coop on the flat roof next door.

  “It is a crime.” Helmut made his voice sound forceful.

  She had the expression of someone who’d just tasted spoiled meat, and he walked away from her, tired of cautioning her, of correcting her whenever she complained about the government. Once, when she’d joked about the Führer’s mustache—“This thing on his face: it looks like a dirty toothbrush”—it had felt to him as though she’d spit on the holy sacrament. It had been a special day for him, the Führer’s birthday, and he’d brought home a large portrait of his idol in celebration of the occasion.

  Throughout the rest of that spring, Helmut became increasingly afraid that one of the neighbors would turn his mother in, and out of that fear grew the idea that it was his obligation to report her. Not that he thought about it constantly, but one evening, when she was doing her weekly mending in the kitchen and wouldn’t even discuss the possibility of signing the house over to him, he realized that—although he couldn’t turn her in for refusing him the house—he could certainly report her for spreading her dangerous ideas. He would be doing his country a service. After all, anyone who supported the Jews postponed the goal of a racially pure country.

  He looked at her, bending across the elbow of his sweater. “If you don’t—” He held his breath, frightened and exhilarated as he felt the power between them shift to his side. Deeply, he inhaled, feeling the brown uniform stretch across his chest. “If you don’t give me the house, I’ll turn you in for the things you’ve been saying.” He heard his words and waited for her to acknowledge that something significant had changed between them, irreversibly, and he was prepared to console and uphold her through that transformation. He felt willing to forget every outrageous word she’d said—if only she crumbled.

  But she kept pulling the needle though the knitted fabric, again and again, and when she finally spoke, she merely told him to go upstairs where he slept with his wife in the room of his childhood. “Go to sleep,” she said as though he were not a family man but still a little boy.

  Her obvious lack of fear and respect convinced Helmut that he should have reported her long ago. Just because she was his mother should not make her immune. What a risk he had taken, listening to her inflammatory comments about the Führer and the Partei. It would be good for her to contemplate her attitude while locked up. By the time she came back—

  If she comes back… He pushed it away, that voice, after the first delirious pang of relief. To be free forever of her disappointment and her love, free of her concern and her carelessness.

  If she comes back … No, they wouldn’t hold her for long. But what if they did? He simply had to teach her a lesson. Once he and Hilde were established in his mother’s rooms, she’d be grateful to live upstairs.

  Renate Eberhardt did not believe her son would turn her in until that Tuesday in June of 1939 when Emil Hesping’s car screeched to a stop in front of her house and he ran inside to warn her that she was about to be picked up.
Within minutes after Renate refused his offer to take her to his uncle’s apartment in Krefeld, Trudi heard the news, and when she reached the white stucco house, her heart beating high in her chest, two of the Eberhardts’ neighbor women were already urging Renate to pack her things. They were watching the street, prepared to bolt from the backdoor as soon as the Gestapo drove up.

  “Often people don’t come back,” one of them said, correcting herself quickly, “at least not for a while,” and the other advised, “Better to have some belongings.”

  “You still have time to hide somewhere,” Trudi implored Frau Eberhardt. “Herr Hesping, he wants to help.”

  “A bedroll.” The other neighbor waved away the flies that buzzed through the kitchen. “She needs a bedroll.”

  “A change of clothing.”

  “Don’t forget soap.”

  “And food.”

  “Yes, food. Something that will keep.”

  “A needle and thread.”

  “Slippers. Slippers are important.”

  “And a towel.”

  “Oh… I don’t need anything.” Renate Eberhardt spoke and moved slowly as though the air around her had thickened like pine honey. Her face had the serene look of the very old, who have forgotten much of their lives, except for a few childhood incidents, and are puzzled to discover all of a sudden that they no longer are young.

  “You can bring everything home again.”

  “You can hide in my house,” Trudi whispered to her.

  Renate Eberhardt shook her head. She walked to the open back window and looked out into her abundant garden. Her thick braids were secured in a double rope in back of her slim neck—a style she’d worn on many occasions but which, now, seemed so ominous to Trudi that she wanted to loosen the graying hair, brush it for Renate, and make her wear it loose, perhaps, a curtain, a refuge.

  “They’ll find me,” Renate said as though she had resigned herself.

  “Don’t say that.”