Children of Wrath

by Paul Grossman

  “I know what it’s like to be scared, is all.” Kai made sure none of the other kids were listening. “I recognized it in your eyes. You don’t think clear when you’re too frightened. So I figured best keep an eye out on you, that’s all.”

  “You’re going to make a great leader.” Willi reached in his pocket. “And I don’t think your bravery should go unrecognized.”

  Digging out a small velvet box, he handed it to Kai. During the war he’d earned numerous decorations, not just an Iron Cross, but also a Golden Merit from the State of Prussia. Encircled with twenty-four-karat laurel leaves and embossed with the coat of arms of the House of Hohenzollern, it was quite a little work of art, something he’d always intended to pass on to his sons. Kai had earned it.

  “You’re giving this to me?” Ribbons of mascara fluttered from his eyes.

  “As a badge of honor.” Willi’d saluted with a quick click of the heels. “But if times ever warrant, Kai,” he added from the side of his mouth as he pinned it onto the chief’s chest, “it’d fetch quite a stack in some markets, if you catch my meaning.”

  * * *

  Children’s laughter mixed with the spashing of the Fairy Tale Fountain. On the sunny park bench, however, grateful as he was, Willi felt far from happy. A silent chasm still yawned between Vicki and him. And it hurt like hell.

  Much as she said she didn’t, he knew she couldn’t quit blaming herself for what had happened, for having napped while Heinz and Erich ran off. Nor could she quit blaming the Winkelmanns for having put the boys in a situation they felt they had to escape. Most of all, though, she blamed Willi–for bringing it upon them. And he couldn’t bear her distance much longer. He yearned for even a touch.

  “Okay, let’s go.” She clapped, watching the boys jump from the fountain.

  They were so excited to be leaving after lunch for a week’s holiday with their aunt and grandparents, they practically ran the rest of the way. Willi hoped once they were gone, he and Vicki would reconcile.

  At the Café am Teich overlooking the Swan Pond, it was warm enough that the Gottmans were having Max’s fifty-fourth birthday on the Rose Terrace. Red flowers still opened here and there, despite autumn leaves tumbling from the sky. Everyone appeared in buoyant spirits. Max especially.

  “They sing about Paris in springtime, boys.” He threw an arm around his grandsons. “But wait till you see it in autumn!”

  “Love your new suit, Vic,” her sister, Ava, said, feeling it with her fingers.

  Willi could see how happy Vicki was wrapped in the bosom of her family, and not for the first time he envied her a little. Just the other day he’d gone to visit his own parents’ graves at the big Jewish cemetery in Weissensee. Wandering down the aisles of black marble mausoleums with their gold-leaf lettering and Jugendstil mosaics, he thought about what an accomplishment it must have felt like for them to purchase even the tiniest plots there, knowing they’d wind up in the same final resting place as philosphers and poets and department-store magnates.

  “What’ll we do the minute we get there?” Bette Gottman repeated Stefan’s question. “Laugh aloud, child, as the Parisians do. Then we’ll have a nice long visit with your great-aunt, my mother’s sister, whom you met once but I’m sure don’t remember.”

  “Mother.” Ava put down her fork. “He was six months old.”

  “Afterwards we’ll go to Galeries Lafayette and get you some new outfits. You can’t go about Paris in German clothes; they always look out-of-date.”

  Vicki’s mother could never get enough of Paris, Willi knew, but this time her excitement felt a little too urgent. She could barely conceal a desire to escape Berlin, even for a week, which one could hardly blame her for. The tension here refused to subside, even for an hour.

  “Did you listen Monday night?” Ava, near the end of the meal, finally brought up. “Have you ever heard anything so grotesque?” She looked at them all.

  She was referring of course to the live broadcast of the Reichstag opening session, when all the new Nazi delegates had showed up in jackboots and uniforms and disrupted everything with catcalls, giving credence to their declaration that they had not come to prop up what was collapsing, but to topple it. The legislative body now was at a total standstill, reduced to trench warfare.

  “Must we, darling?” her mother begged, reaching to rearrange her daughter’s scarf.

  But Ava seemed unwilling to abandon current events. “I’m so proud of Thomas Mann, at least.” She brushed away her mother’s hand.

  Before a meeting of the Prussian Academy, Germany’s most prominent writer had cried out for democrats to lay aside their differences and unite against the Nazi threat. Even stormtroopers who’d infiltrated the hall hadn’t been able stop him, although it did require police protection. Still, the reactionary tide was undoubtedly having an effect on Berlin’s cultural life. When stink bombs caused hysteria at the premiere of All Quiet on the Western Front, the authorities, rather than standing firm, reversed an earlier decision and decreed the film “harmful to public morale,” banning all futher showings.

  “It’s all because of the collapse.” Max folded his napkin over and over. “People aren’t thinking rationally.”

  “Even at the university,” Ava concurred, “intelligent minds have deduced something ‘mystical’ about the Nazis.”

  The speed of their political ascendancy was indeed remarkable. The Social Democats had fought for decades for a first block of Reichstag seats. The Nazis had won a quarter of the floor in one election. People said such a triumph could not be explained by ordinary means. That it had the feel of the miraculous. Of destiny.

  Willi’s cousin Kurt called it a neurotic defense on a nationwide scale and was openly depressed about it. He diagnosed Germans as having an inferiority complex that caused them to overcompensate, deluding themselves with a sense of superiority and feeling outrage when reality didn’t coincide with their inflated egos. Precisely the sort of neurosis, he said, that made shouldering responsibility for their own misfortunes impossible and required a scapegoat on which ills could be expiated.

  There was no doubt who that would be.

  True, in their second day in office the Nazi delegates quit catcalling and got down to business, introducing a series of anti-Semitic legislation that impressed even old-time anti-Semites. The goal: complete elimination of Jewish “influence” over Germany—in all professions, in all levels of government, education, civil service. Police included. As small a chance of a measure such as the Aryan Law had of passing, Kurt feared if the economic situation didn’t stabilize, the position of Germany’s six hundred thousand Jews might grow serious.

  Willi’d faced a lot more anti-Semitism in his life than Kurt, a psychiatrist in a practically all-Jewish institute. But even if Kurt’s analysis sounded extreme, Willi had a lot of respect for his psychological insight. He’d been dead-on with Der Kinderfresser. As sensitive as Willi was to issues of family security just now, he had to consider what might happen if they did ever have to leave the country. Where would they go? Join his sister in Palestine? The British had just curtailed Jewish immigration there. And last year, so many Jews had been hacked to death during the Arab riots.

  Of course, the Nazi Party was far from running Germany. The larger their movement grew, the more cracks appeared within it. The other day stormtroopers had wrecked their own headquarters, furious at their meager sausage rations. Berlin police had to be called in before they killed each other. Anything could happen.

  “For God’s sake,” Vicki’s mother interjected, handing around helpings of Black Forest cake, “it’s Papa’s birthday. Must we really?”

  “Mom’s right,” Vicki said, taking the knife from her. “Let’s talk about the family. How’re Tante Hedwig and Onkel Albrecht?” She cut a piece of cake for Willi.

  “Perfectly fine.” Vicki’s mother adjusted her beads. Despite her vindication she still seemed uncomfortable. “But do you remember that nice young couple next door
to them, the Liebmans? So terrible. The other morning, right at the breakfast table, he dropped dead.”

  Vicki put down the cake. “You mean the pharmacist? With the glasses?”

  “Thirty-nine years old. Finished his toast and just keeled over.”

  Vicki flashed a look at Willi. “How awful.”

  * * *

  The sun was already dipping westward when they hugged Erich and Stefan good-bye and closed the door on the Gottmans’ Mercedes, wishing them a bon voyage. As the car sped off, Ava waved happily, thrilled whenever she got a chance to mother those kids.

  Walking from the park amid lengthening shadows, Vicki inched nearer, then slowly, surely, slipped her fingers into Willi’s, waves of relief spreading through his body as her head leaned against his shoulder. They stopped and embraced and stood there a long time.

  “Oh, Willi. I’m so afraid of losing you.”

  “Shhh. I’m not going anywhere.”

  “But you never—”

  “Shhhh.”

  A few minutes later, waiting for the streetcar, the sun had dropped behind the trees and a cool breeze picked up. Vicki put her hand in his jacket pocket while Willi kept it warm. Gazing across the busy avenue, he saw the many smokestacks rising from the Central-Viehof, and for a moment felt the world was as it ought to be.

  Then something began pounding at his brain.

  Drums.

  And trumpets. Ringing glockenspiels.

  Rounding the corner, a brown-and-black wall appeared down Landsberger Allee, backing up traffic, drawing crowds—uniforms four abreast, boots shaking the pavement, swastikas on bloodred banners. Clean, sharp, flawless, their precision reminded Willi of the Tiller Girls that night at the Admirals-Palast when Josephine Baker had appeared, the spectators equally dazzled now by the uniformity of movement.

  Drawing directly in front of them finally, these ranks, they saw, were not composed of well-disciplined young men, but children. Willi’d witnessed them before—youthful legionnaires behind whom Germany was supposed to fall in line, tossing leaflets, marching in the Sportpalast—but never up so close. They barely had peach fuzz on their chins. Some looked no older than Erich, drums almost as big as they. But their faces were like steel traps slammed shut, eyes fiery furnaces, as if they knew nothing, saw nothing but the most bitter enemy ahead.

  Not unlike the look Irmgard and Otto had the morning Heinzie died.

  Poor, sweet kid next door. Willi’d rescued him from the flames that night, but unlike Erich and the others, he’d never come to. The narcotics von Hessler’d pumped through his body had sent him into a coma from which he never emerged. When he was finally gone, the explosion of anger from their neighbors’ mouths made their prior confrontation seem cordial. The severing of relations, they’d repeatedly stressed, had been nothing but a matter of self-preservation. With their only son’s death, though, some ancient hatred burst to the surface as if from the bottom of a deep, dark well.

  “It’s true what they say, then—you are only out for yourselves. You manage to save Erich, but our boy is dead. Chosen ones!”

  “Madness,” Vicki said now of the neat-combed hair and grimacing faces storming by. “I don’t understand, Willi, what is it they want? Another war?”

  “They’re not even old enough to remember the last one,” Willi said, pulling her closer. Holding her tightly, he began to see not merely the mechanized rows of defiant youth but all the homeless, hungry children of Berlin. The nine- and ten-year-olds lined up in the Linden Passage. The miserable faces at the peddlers’ market, behind their barrels of slop. The wretched butchered prisoners in the Köhlers’ chambers of horror. Even little, round-cheeked Heinzie Winkelmann, cracked across the face. All the punishments, the canes and whips, the sticks and spankings. The brutal insistence on submission. I’d rather have a dead son than a disobedient one.

  “Willi, please, can’t we go?” Vicki clenched his hand.

  He took her arm, ready to walk, but the streetcar finally clanged around the corner and they jumped on board. Grabbing seats, they could see them outside, these furious children, and hear them shaking earth and sky with their song:

  We are the joyous Hitler youth!

  Our leader is our savior

  The Pope and Rabbi shall be gone

  We want to be pagans again!

  Epilogue

  WINTER 1947

  BRITISH MANDATE, PALESTINE

  Sun beat down on Dizengoff Circle, the modern heart of Tel Aviv. In the planted oasis at its center, well-dressed couples pushed baby carriages or relaxed on benches in the shade of palms, watching the fountain dance. Beyond the greenery, long avenues lined with angular white buildings rolled up the turquoise coast—a glistening new metropolis.

  Willi took a deep breath. The top of his head was burning. Yet again he’d forgotten a hat, he realized. In the eight years since he’d been in the Middle East, he still couldn’t remember half of what he was supposed to: the sun, the heatstroke, that Dizengoff wasn’t Kurfürstendamm. That January here was like August in northern Europe. As much of a fish out of water as he sometimes felt, though, how much lighter and freer Tel Aviv was than Berlin.

  Whatever was left of his old hometown anyway, he mused.

  Not that trouble hadn’t followed him here. He inched into the shade as he waited to cross Ben Ami Street. If it ever came to all-out conflict, he knew there’d be no escaping this time. For one thing, both the boys would be in it.

  Erich and Stefan had joined the Haganah, the underground army of Jewish Palestine. Erich, twenty-five, named Eitan now, was with the intelligence services, a chip off the old block, training for work, Willi was sure, behind enemy lines. Stefan, who’d changed his name to Zvi, was twenty-three and in the Palmach, the most elite “strike force” unit. Willi was hurrying to meet him now, on one of the rare weekend leaves Zvi got from Beit Keshet, a secret training camp in the Galilee.

  But passing a news kiosk just a block from their meeting place, Willi’s feet froze to the pavement. My God. His throat parched painfully. Plastered across the morning papers: that face.

  Grabbing a copy, he sank onto a bench, reading. The caption called her Ilse Koch, but there was no mistaking that pockmarked skin. Those dead gray eyes. She had made it down the smoky staircase all those years ago.

  Now her infamy was worldwide.

  Quickly, he ascertained from Ha’aretz that after fleeing the burning tower in the Viehof that night in 1930, the youngest Köhler had slipped across the frontier into Poland and cocooned herself in German-speaking Danzig until the spring of ’33, when her kind seized power in Germany. Then she flew back on butterfly wings. Married a handsome SS colonel. Became a Kommandant’s wife at one of the premier concentration camps. Now she and her husband were both facing war-crimes charges. Ilse Koch was said to have been so insatiably cruel that those she tormented had dubbed her the Bitch of Buchenwald. Some of the acts she’d been accused of included, Willi read with a mounting vertigo, having inmates skinned alive for tattoos and using their flesh for making …

  He let the paper slip to his lap.

  My God, he thought.

  Handbags and lampshades.

  * * *

  Under twirling electric fans, Café Esther was crowded with Tel Avivians from around the world. Egyptian Jews with wide lips. Polish Jews with bright blue eyes. Loud, laughing Romanian Jews, decked out in jewelry. And Yekkes such as himself, Willi thought—German Jews, fussy and fastidious, sipping tea not from glasses but regular china cups, thank you.

  Quickly surmising his son had not yet arrived, he sat at a corner table and tried to relax, but couldn’t suppress ugly memories of the Köhler siblings. Just last month, the Tel Aviv press had published pretrial testimony for the tribunals being prepared against Nazi physicians in Nuremberg. In them, he’d been shocked to discover the ghastly destiny of Ilse’s older sister, Magda. A fate shared most ironically with her twisted business partner, the mad Dr. von Hessler.

  Both had wou
nd up at the Berlin-Buch Psychiatric Hospital, Ward 6, for the criminally insane, where von Hessler had not surprisingly managed to talk his way out of custody in the mid-1930s, and nearly succeeded in getting his Tower of Silence rebuilt. Some in the regime very much supported his work, wanting it resumed on a far grander scale. But the one-eyed doctor apparently hadn’t been able to keep his mouth shut about the fallacy of Nazi racial theories and wound up, once the war began, reinstitutionalized.

  In the winter of 1940, all inmates in Ward 6, Berlin-Buch, were among the early participants in something called Aktion T4, for the mentally ill. Patients deemed “unworthy of life” were led into rooms disguised as showers and gassed with carbon monoxide. The cheap, clean death von Hessler himself had so enthusiastically embraced for his boy guinea pigs came back to return the favor—and went on to be a prototype for the extermination of millions.

  * * *

  Willi looked at his watch, impatient but not concerned by Zvi’s tardiness. He’d learned by now the Middle East did not run on German clocks. Taking a slow sip of tea he remembered how long each second had felt during those twenty-three hours von Hessler’d had his son. The genius scientist with his damaged frontal lobe had at least correctly forecast the memory loss: to this day Erich remembered nothing of his kidnapping. He never forgot what happened that morning on the terrace with the Winkelmanns, though. It marked the beginning of the end for them in Germany. For all of them.

  Beneath the slowly turning fans, the kind, bright eyes of Dr. Weiss wafted through Willi’s mind. In those last years before the Nazi takeover, the deputy president of the Berlin police had sued Joseph Goebbels twenty-eight times for slander, and won each case. To no avail. Goebbels became one of the most powerful men in the Third Reich, and Weiss—a truly great figure in the history of German law enforcement—was forced to run for his life, a disenfranchised exile, destined for obscurity.

  “Slicha. Inspector Kraus, I expect?”

  A slender woman in her mid-thirties, dark hair swept under a yellow scarf, eyes like shiny olives, was standing over him suddenly, clutching a handbag.