The Prosperous Thief

by Andrea Goldsmith

  And of course, of course, Renate says to Martin, if Shanghai is their best option – their only option, Martin now says – then they’ll go to Shanghai. So they sit in the shade of night, wrapped in overcoats and regret, Martin planning the various steps to take them from Krefeld in Germany to Shanghai in China, Renate trying to determine if it is possible when all hope is gone to exist under the raised fist of persecution. Alice sleeps on a couch nearby, her whole life in front of her should she ever have the chance, and in her bedroom, Amalie Friedman, elegant even in nightclothes, is lying in bed waiting for the pain in her chest to subside so she can slip into dreams of the past.

  When the fires begin late on the night of the ninth of November, the clouds over the Jewish districts of Germany and Austria are sheathed in reds and pinks. The next day, dawn comes late to Jews. The sun is a perfect burnished disc in an evenly charred sky and a smell of burning gorges on the ruins. No secret network is required to spread the news, no clandestine telephone calls nor underground telegraph, for German radio and newspapers are proud to report the spontaneous uprisings across Germany and Austria as good Germans vent their anger over vom Rath’s death. Synagogues, schools, community centres, Jewish hospitals, kindergartens, all of them described as sites of anti-German ferment, have been plundered and torched. The few Jewish shops and businesses to have survived the onslaughts of recent years are now destroyed. Jewish homes are stormed and wrecked, and Jews themselves have been beaten, tortured and dragged off to concentration camps.

  Around dawn on Thursday morning, Martin, Renate and Alice Lewin are gathered at their dining table. Alice has finished breakfast, the others could not eat. They sit in silence while the wireless intones triumph after German triumph and they hear loss after loss. City by city, town by town, a litany of destruction. And such delight taken in burning the Jewish books of prayer and learning. The way the paper burns, differently according to the German press than Christian scriptures, and the Hebrew script described as if the letters themselves harbour sinister intent. Five thousand years of learning is now nothing more than a Jewish plot to take over Germany. The people of the book are going up in smoke and the most civilised people in the world are fanning the flames.

  The beating of boots on a wooden stair is terrifying when you know they’re coming for you. Slowly, firmly, closer, louder, a relentless beat in perfect unison, at least two men, possibly more, closer, louder, and coming for you. Through the street door, up the first stairs, their tight-throated voices barking and laughing; no need for silence, no need for surprise when there’s no escape and everyone realises it. Then a splinter of silence that digs deep in your body, and you try to breathe but the air has gone, and the pounding in your gut is tearing you open, a moment of silence but it feels like forever. A fist to the door on the flat below, a fist thudding hard till the door is opened. And you breathe again, they’re not here for you. But of course for you, who else would they want? Herr Fischer receives a blast from Bavaria: it’s Lewin they want, which flat is Lewin’s? Asks not for the answer, they know where Lewin is, but as a warning to anyone who might help a Jew.

  Upstairs Martin and Renate stand close and frozen. They’ve planned numerous escape routes, but when the boots are on the stairs, all plans are useless.Alice is alert and watching, they reach her together, but with one of them needing to confront the thugs, it is Renate who lifts the child and holds her tight.

  The boots start again. They’re on the stairs. They’re on the landing. They’re outside the door. Three crisp knocks. Martin slips the bolt. The door whips open. Three men burst in. Martin is hurled to the floor. They lift him up, they slam him to the table. Crash goes his head against the mahogany. Crash go their fists into his sweet earnest face.

  ‘What do you want?’ Renate is shouting.‘We’ll give you what you want.’

  They laugh at her, they’ll take what they want. They’ve been working for hours, they know exactly what they want. Alice is softly crying. Renate covers the child’s eyes while cupboards are emptied, crockery is hurled against walls, jewellery pocketed, books torn apart, chairs thrown through windows, quilts and pillows slit open. And now the men turn, they turn on Renate, they advance towards her with their filthy taunts. She shoves her daughter behind the sofa, shouts at her to stay still. The men approach, they’re peeling off their gloves, such white hands, such slender fingers, reaching towards Renate, about to grab.

  And suddenly through the storm of feathers is the stony presence of Amalie Friedman. She’s strong this Jew and as German as their mothers, she glides into the room glacial and ghostly. She stands and stares, the thugs stop and watch. No one is moving, no one is speaking. She mounts a chair then steps on the table. She looms over them, large and marmoreal. Quilt feathers puff in piles about her bare feet. The men stare up at her, her face is blue, she raises her arms, she holds the world, she’s huge, she clasps her chest, she’s falling, slowly falling, a shadowy spectre in her white robe. She strikes the table, the noise is explosive, the table cracks, a little moan, a little splutter, and then an unearthly silence.

  One man is on his knees, he doesn’t understand what is happening. His leader pulls him to his feet.

  ‘We’ll leave these ones,’ he says to his men. And to Martin he adds,‘For now.’

  Martin can be repaired. A doctor attends him, not their usual Dr Rosenbaum, the Nazis took him away, but the Fischers’ doctor – called by them and paid by them too. He works silently, washing, stitching and dressing the wounds, and when he leaves he tells them he’ll not be back, nor can they, he nods in the direction of the Fischer flat, do anything more for you.

  Amalie Friedman is dead, one of the hundreds of Kristallnacht casualties. She cannot be buried until late the following day as there is no one available to perform the ceremony, and when finally the burial does occur, it is in a small wooded area outside Krefeld and not in the plot next to her husband in Düsseldorf cemetery as Amalie always intended. The service, attended by Renate and Martin and two strangers to dig the grave, is conducted by a cantor not a rabbi, who worries he won’t make it back to Düsseldorf before sunset and the start of the sabbath. Martin can hardly walk, but insists on being with Renate. She is distraught. Her adored mother is dead, her mother who thrived on love and generosity and music, killed by brutes who wouldn’t know goodness if they were choking on it.

  Martin tries to reassure her it is better, safer, to bury Amalie here in this secluded wood. Cemeteries were a favourite target on Kristallnacht, headstones reduced to rubble, fragments of Hebrew littering the ground, as if desecration of the dead, of the past, of memory, strikes a firmer blow at the souls of the living. And who knows what has happened to Jewish graves in Düsseldorf? Who knows whether Renate’s father’s grave still exists?

  ‘It’s no way to farewell your mother,’ says Renate as they stand by the fresh mound of dirt.

  It is worse when they are back at the flat, the wreckage such raw testimony to the violence of Amalie’s death. Martin starts to sort through the ruins, but Renate sees no point. She clears the debris off an armchair, lays a small cloth over the torn cushion and sits herself down. There’s a raw pain where her mother used to be, a gouged-out emptiness and no one can fill it. It would help if her brother were here, but Erich doesn’t even know his mother is dead. Erich is imprisoned in the Buchenwald camp. They came for him at three o’clock the same morning his mother died. They would have taken his son Willi too, but their instructions were clear: only males over sixteen to be arrested.‘Another month,’ they said, having read Willi’s papers, ‘and we’ll come back for your birthday.’

  Renate can be repaired, but not yet. For the moment she doesn’t want to think, doesn’t want to feel. She wants to crouch in a shadowy crevice of her own making, a precarious sanctuary separating the past when her mother was still alive from a future which appears hopeless. She wants to pull down the shutters on thought; she wants to black out the blistering image of Amalie rising above a bunch of thugs in
a last heroic act to save her family. She wants to forget until time has given her strength to remember.

  As for Alice, she’s only six years old, but after what she has seen, even if she were sixty she would be forever changed. Can a child watch her father being bashed to a bloody husk and not be affected? Can she see her grandmother rise like a phoenix and crash to her death, or witness her mother so immured in grief she is no longer in the world? Can a child see all this and not bear scars? Can she domesticate such horrors and continue with life? Or does she try to snuff out memory and decide that whatever she saw simply did not happen? It’s hard to know with Alice, but if she does remember, she wears her horrors chastely.

  It helps she is a practical child who has already learned that if she’s labouring for others she can’t be gnawing at herself. She assists her father with his wounds and her mother with hers. She insists on being the one to go out for food and other essentials – not that there is any alternative in the days following Kristallnacht with her father hardly able to walk and her mother closed to the world. Alice stuffs her terror behind usefulness and tries to convince herself she’ll be safe. She knows she is pretty in a German sort of way, and she’s making a point of shopping in neighbourhoods where her family is not known. And although she’s always been scared of the dark, she is prepared to brave the strange streets late in the day, because no German child of her age would be shopping during school hours. There’s danger everywhere, and as she makes her way home through the dark streets, she fills her head with stories in order to thwart the terrors.

  And there’s the trick. In order to do the shopping, to walk the dark streets, to help her mother and her father, to forget her Oma falling down dead, there are some things she cannot allow herself to think – not for a moment, not even for a blink of an eyelid – for, if she did, she too might collapse.

  But it is not easy, neither in the streets nor at home. There is a smell to despair and it is distressingly human. It is acid and mould and a smoky sweat, and no matter how much she washes or dabs herself with her mother’s cologne, Alice cannot escape it. She is doing her best not to think about that horrible morning, but her mother’s despair clings to them all.

  At night Alice lies in her bed wondering what her family has done so offensive to God that he has made them Jews. If she knew, she would make amends and all of them would be saved and go to America. Being born a Jew is worse than anything Alice can imagine.And it’s never been any different. By the time she was old enough to talk, Hitler was running the country. Hitler, the all-seeing, all-hearing monster you could complain about only at home, and then only in whispers. Hitler who hates Jews so much he won’t let Jewish children attend school or Jewish grown-ups go to work, who wants Jews out of Germany never mind how long they’ve lived here. Alice has never known anything different. So when her father says with each new repressive law, ‘It’s not good for the Jews’, and repeats the same old refrain with the huge new concentration camps, ‘It’s not good for the Jews’, and now, with vom Rath’s death and still he’s saying, ‘It’s not good for the Jews’, Alice wants to know when has it ever been good for the Jews?

  The flat seems to be shrinking. Renate’s despair occupies a lot of space. Not wanting the burden of that dreadful grief, Alice gives her mother a wide berth. She wants to open the windows and let out the smell, but Mutti is always cold and Vati says they mustn’t draw attention to themselves. He says they must be quiet as mice and act as if invisible. He says that if the SS come again, he wants the Fischers to say the Lewins have gone. The wireless, pitched at a murmur, is never turned off. They eat their cold food, they drink their ersatz coffee, they read, they whisper and her father tries to pull strings down the telephone. But no one in Berlin is listening, much less in Palestine or America, Britain or Brazil.

  When she is older Alice will say her childhood ended on Kristallnacht, but at the time, while she looks after her parents and negotiates the hostile streets and endears herself to hostile people, she is convinced things will soon return to normal. But even when Martin is feeling better he still does not go out. It is not simply the mess of wounds and bandages, the people are enraged. Vom Rath has achieved a status in death inconceivable when he was alive. And while the transformation of this ordinary functionary into hero and martyred son has occurred across Germany, his home town of Düsseldorf just twenty-five kilometres away has embraced the task with particular fervour. It would be a foolhardy Jew who took to the streets for anything other than essential business.

  Martin has tried to contact his brother, but he has disappeared. It seems inconceivable that Fritz with all his connections would have been arrested, and equally inconceivable he would have left for America without telling them. Fritz’s disappearance, Martin’s own injuries, Renate almost comatose, no contacts, poor prospects for visas, no money, and any day now no place to live. In the right hands it would make a good Jewish joke, but as the stuff of your life, it feels like hell.

  Some hours speed by, others bog down in futility. As the days pass, Martin’s wounds settle into tolerable aches, the bruising stretches into a palette of murky yellows, greens and browns. Occasionally emotions flicker and spark, but mostly they are leaden on the heart. Life does not exactly go on nor does it peter out, rather it hangs like one of those painted backdrops at the theatre, noticed at first glance, but soon subsumed by the drama being played out in the footlights.

  Early the following Wednesday, vom Rath’s body is brought by train to Düsseldorf. It is a dank, foggy day, and as the train passes through the towns from Aachen on the Dutch border to Düsseldorf where the body is to lie in state, the flags are limp at half-mast and the people lining the railway tracks bedraggled in their clothes. Just the right weather for a funeral, Alice decides as she sits on the couch turning the pages of her legends from Greece and Rome, not reading, just looking at the coloured plates. Martin is perched by the wireless, while Renate dull and dazed is in her usual place by the window. Alice glances at both of them before returning to her book, turning the pages ever so slowly until she comes to a picture of the River Lethe flowing through a grey-green light, with the boatman rowing the souls of the dead. The mood of the picture exactly matches the mood outside, and in both the dead are travelling to a final resting place. Although, unlike the poor souls in the picture, vom Rath is going nowhere near Hades. His path goes straight to heaven, with a brief stopover at the Rheinlandhalle where Hitler himself will pay his respects.

  Alice suddenly closes her book. A movement by the window. Her mother has roused herself, is shuffling towards the wireless. She’s thin and crumpled but at least she’s moving. And now propped on the arm of a chair, her bony whiteness bent to the machine. The body of vom Rath has arrived in Düsseldorf and is already in place with people filing past. The announcer describes the scene as solemn, proudly German, and explosive.

  While her parents clasp each other and listen to the wireless, Alice goes to her room and, without really understanding why, pulls out her jack-in-the-box. With the word ‘explosive’ hard in her head she opens the lid and the figure bursts out. She pushes it down, closes the lid, and another explosion when she releases it again. Over and over, close then open, until the report on the wireless is finished. Then one last time she opens the lid, this time to give the jack-in-the-box his freedom. Out he pops and there he will remain nodding and smiling on her bedside table, long after she and her family have left Krefeld.

  While vom Rath lies in state in the Rheinlandhalle, the violence and arrests continue as they have since Kristallnacht, with the exception of the previous Sunday which Hitler decreed a day of rest. Throughout the day of vom Rath’s homecoming, Renate remains bent to the wireless, refusing food and ignoring conversation. At around six o’clock the telephone rings; it is Dora, Erich’s wife in Berlin, and suddenly Renate is back in command. She takes the handpiece from Martin and speaks to her sister-in-law. There’s no news of Erich, but word is out that the incarcerations are only for a limit
ed time. It appears that the terror of Kristallnacht is far more concerned with filling the Nazi coffers and persuading Jews to emigrate than the slaying of Ernst vom Rath. In fact, Dora knows of two men who have already been released.

  ‘They both had valid visas and convinced the authorities they’d leave Germany immediately,’ she says.‘They’ve already gone.’

  ‘And the conditions at the camps? What have you heard?’’

  Renate wouldn’t want to know, Dora says, but Erich is strong and in good health and should manage better than most. Although this is not the reason for her call. She wants, indeed is insisting the Lewins join her and Willi in Berlin. It will be a tight squeeze in their flat, but the Lewins in Krefeld are far too close to the current ferment.

  ‘And besides,’ she says,‘with all the foreign embassies in Berlin, you’ll find the visa situation just that much less frustrating.’ There is a short pause, and then with undisguised urgency: ‘Catch the early train from Düsseldorf. Just get out of there before Hitler arrives for vom Rath’s funeral.’

  The flat is unliveable, the landlord is demanding recompense for damage, otherwise he’ll evict them. It’s like living on a bomb site with bombs still to be detonated, but nonetheless Renate and Martin decide it is far too risky to leave prior to Hitler’s arrival. Already, with twenty-four hours until the funeral, there has been an influx of dignitaries from all over the country. The station at Düsseldorf will be overrun with Gestapo, SS, SA. They decide it is best to leave their journey until vom Rath is buried and off the front pages. They telephone Dora in Berlin and tell her to expect them the following Monday.