Magnolia Square

by Margaret Pemberton

  Not all the shops had been Jewish. Heidelberg had never possessed a particularly large Jewish population. Wurtz’s bookshop was still there. Wilhelm Wurtz had been a friend of her father’s. Where had he been, though, when her father had been dragged with Heini out on to the street and shot? Where had any of the people they had lived amongst been? She forced herself to keep on walking, knowing the answer. They had been hiding behind shuttered windows, refusing to see; refusing to be held accountable.

  She remembered Nuremberg, and her wool-gloved fists tightened. Some of the main perpetrators were, at least, now standing trial for the millions and millions of lives they had destroyed, but what of the millions who had given them their support? And what of the others? Germans who had never belonged to the Nazi party? Germans who had been appalled by Hitler way back in the thirties and, as he brought their country to destruction and defeat, had continued to be appalled by him?

  She walked past Wilhelm Wurtz’s bookshop knowing that he, and those like him, were also accountable. That their very passivity made them accountable. Her footsteps slowed, stopped. There was the shop which had once been an Apotheke – her father’s Apotheke. The window was empty now, a handful of overturned display stands showing that it had last traded as a milliner’s. Hardly able to breathe, she looked up to the windows above. There, behind the now closed shutters of the third floor bedroom window, she had been born. The room next to it had been her grandmother’s room. The room below it had been their sitting-room. Nothing looked as it had once looked. The exterior, once so spick and span, was now shabby and uncared for. Paint peeled off the window frames; the wrought iron of the balconies, once a sunny yellow, were now a patched and dirty grey. A sitting-room window shutter hung by only one hinge. The creeper that had once clothed the upper storey had long since withered and died.

  But someone was still living there. Through one of the windows she could glimpse washing drying. With her heart slamming and the blood beating a crescendo in her ears, she walked across to the doorstep and knocked on the door that led up to the rooms above the shop. For a long, long time there was no response and then, at last, she heard sounds of movement. Someone was shuffling along the corridor from the kitchen at the back. Someone elderly and infirm.

  ‘Please God let it be Grossmutter!’ Christina whispered, her mouth dry, the ground unsteady beneath her feet. ‘Please, God! Please!’

  ‘Ja? Kann ich Ihnen helfen?’ The woman was not, after all, that old. She was simply bone weary and stiff with cold. ‘Kann ich Ihnen helfen?’ she asked again, curiosity sharpening her eyes.

  ‘Is . . . Are . . .’ Her disappointment was so overpowering she was almost incapable of speech. ‘Are Frau Berger and Frau Frank living here?’ she managed at last, in German. ‘This used to be their home—’

  The woman’s look of curiosity vanished. ‘No-one of the names of Berger or Frank has ever lived here,’ she said stolidly. ‘Go away, please. I don’t talk at my door. My husband is dead – butchered in Normandy. My children are dead. Go away, please.’

  ‘They did live here,’ Christina said passionately, putting the flat of her hand hard against the door, refusing to let the woman close it on her. ‘I lived here! Have my mother and grandmother been back, asking after me? Has anyone—’

  ‘Nein! Es tut mir leid!’ This time the woman succeeded in slamming shut the door.

  Outside the bookshop, a skinny cat yowled. An American jeep sped past the top of the street, heading in the direction of the Kornmarkt. A snowflake fell on to her cheek. Numbly she wiped it away. They weren’t here. She fought a disappointment so monumentally crushing, she could scarcely breathe. Had she really expected them to be in the house that had once been their home? Would there be a Jew in the whole of Germany living back in the homes from which they had been evicted?

  With leaden footsteps, she began to walk back down the narrow street, away from the Kornmarkt. Just because she had not found them immediately did not mean that they weren’t in Heidelberg. And Heidelberg wasn’t London. It wasn’t a city so big that people could search for each other in it for a lifetime without achieving success. Mist was creeping up from the nearby river Neckar, snaking over the cobbles. She would have to find somewhere to sleep; somewhere to stay. And she would have to start knocking on doors, showing people photographs of her mother and grandmother; asking questions. Perhaps the American Headquarters might be the best place to begin her search. Perhaps they had a list of people returning to the city to look for lost relatives.

  She was again walking past the bookshop and she paused. If Wilhelm Wurtz had seen her mother and grandmother in the city, he would have recognized them. And even if he hadn’t seen them since the end of the war, he might have news of where they had been taken to, what had happened to them.

  With snowflakes clinging to her beret and the shoulders of her coat, she turned the handle of the door and stepped inside the small, dim, musty-smelling shop. Wilhelm Wurtz was on a step-ladder, dusting the books on one of his top shelves with a feather duster. As his door chimed open, he stopped what he was doing, peering downwards towards her over the top of rimless spectacles.

  ‘Kann ich Ihnen helfen?’ he asked, beginning to clamber back down his step-ladder.

  Christina waited until he had safely descended and then said in German, ‘It’s Christina Frank, Herr Wurtz. Do you remember me? I lived with my brother and parents and grandmother at number nine.’

  Wilhelm Wurtz tottered heavily against a bookshelf. Mother of God! Did he remember her! Her brother and father shot to death in the street! Her mother and grandmother arrested like dogs! How could he ever have forgotten? How would he ever forget?

  ‘Du lieber Himmel!’ he said hoarsely, crossing himself. ‘Where have you come from, child? I thought you were dead. I thought you were all dead.’

  ‘All?’ For a dizzying sick moment Christina was tempted to ask if he meant all Jews, and then she saw the distress on his face and knew he had meant her family. ‘Heini and Papa are dead, but I don’t believe my mother and grandmother are dead. That’s why I’m here, Herr Wurtz. That’s why I’ve come back. To find them.’

  Wilhelm Wurtz forced himself away from the support of the bookshelves and stepped unsteadily towards her. ‘But they’re dead, child. Surely they are dead? No-one taken away as your mother and grandmother were taken away, ever returned to their homes. Such terrible years they have been – terrible years.’ He reached out for her hands, grasping hold of them, tears of shame and guilt misting his spectacle lenses. ‘The Levys were taken away, too, then the Cohens, and others – so many others. What could Germans like myself do? There was talk of people like your family being resettled in the far east of the country. For a long time we believed it. We believed it because we wanted to believe it. But now Nuremberg . . . the newsreels of the camps . . .’

  Though tears were now rolling down his face, Christina said nothing. What did he expect her to say? That she understood why he, and others like him, had put their own safety first, not speaking out as their Jewish neighbours were hounded or dragged from their homes? Why they had pretended those taken away were being ‘resettled’, when anyone with their wits about them would have known they were being rail-roaded across the country into death camps.

  He turned his head away, unable to look her in the eyes. For a long moment silence stretched between them and then Christina said, ‘You said that you thought all my family were dead, Herr Wurtz. Does that mean you haven’t seen my mother or grandmother since their arrest? They haven’t been back here, looking for me?’

  He shook his head. ‘Nein,’ he said thickly. ‘No-one has been looking for you, child. And if they do, where shall I tell them to find you? Where are you living now? How did you survive?’

  ‘I live in London.’ The words seemed strange, alien, almost unbelievable. ‘I live at number twelve Magnolia Square. And I’m married. My married name is Robson.’

  Wilhelm Wurtz stared at her. ‘An Englishman?’


  Christina thought of Cologne, bombed into rubble by the RAF. ‘Yes,’ she said unapologetically, thinking of other things. Of Dachau and Belsen and Sachsenhausen, of Buchenwald and Ravensbrueck and Maidenek. Of horrors and nightmares beyond speech or imagining.

  Wisely, Wilhelm Wurtz kept his thoughts to himself and took a stubby pencil from behind his ear. He would write the address down, just in case anyone should come searching for her. But he wouldn’t tell his wife about it. He wouldn’t tell anyone. ‘The woman now living in your family home is a slut,’ he said as he walked her to the door. ‘She never cleans. The street is becoming slum. It was different in the old days, before the war, before Hitler.’

  Christina turned her coat collar up against the cold. ‘Auf Wiedersehen,’ she said, not wanting to talk about the woman now living in the house; not wanting to know what kind of a housewife she was. Once out in the street, she took one last look towards the house of her birth. A yellow smudge was still faintly discernible on the brickwork, near the door. It was where Storm Troopers had painted a yellow Star of David.

  With her jaw clenched tight, she turned away, walking quickly down the street in the direction of the Marktplatz. Once she had found her mother and grandmother, she would take them away from Heidelberg and out of Germany, and none of them would ever return. As she thought of how her friends and neighbours in Magnolia Square would greet and cherish them, homesickness swept over her in swamping waves. Everyone would immediately befriend them, just as they had befriended her. Kate and Carrie, Miriam and Leah, Ruth and Pru, Emily and Esther, Harriet and Nellie, even Hettie and Anna. And the men, too. Mr Giles would see that they were housed. Albert would tend their garden for them, and give them the pick of the produce from his fruit and vegetable stall. Charlie would amble across the Heath with them. Leon would make sure all their odd jobs were done. Daniel Collins would amiably pass the time of day with them. Carl Voigt would give them back their faith in human nature.

  She came to a halt at the junction of the Marktplatz and the picturesque alleyway leading to the river, blinded by tears, overcome by love for all the people who now made up her world. Her heart seemed to lurch within her breast as she thought of the person she loved the most. She had to be able to complete her search and return with her mother and grandmother to England before he was demobbed, for if he were demobbed and returned home in her absence, he would never understand, not in a million years.

  She turned right, walking down Steingasse to the Alte Brücke, as she had done so many hundreds of times in her other life – the life before the rise of Adolf Hitler. Despite being shrapnel-blasted and battered, the old town bridge still stood. River mist swirled around the base of its turrets, clothing it in a semblance of its pre-war picturesqueness. She walked under the portcullis that led on to it and then stood, her hands deep in her pockets, staring down into the slow-moving waters of the Neckar. What would Jack say when he knew what she had done? Would he see her action as being some kind of a betrayal? He thought of her as a south-London girl, a little different from Kate and Carrie and Mavis and Pru. He would have to think differently now. And he might not want to do so.

  She shivered, feeling suddenly violently unwell. There was pain behind her eyes and a sickly queasiness in her stomach. Abruptly she turned away from the sight of the grey-green water. She had to find somewhere to sleep; somewhere to stay. And tomorrow she had to begin a search of the city, a search that would leave not a single stone unturned.

  The room she found was on Augustinerstrasse. It was meanly furnished and, in a city and a country where coal was as rare as gold-dust, freezingly cold. It was, however, still in the old part of the city, and she slept in her clothes, her coat spread over the worn blankets for extra warmth.

  After less than an hour, she knew that her feeling of sickness was nothing to do with fear of what the future held for her and Jack. She was shivering and shaking, not with mere cold, but with a raging temperature.

  Morning brought no relief. Deeply grateful for the English tea and biscuits she had brought with her, she forced herself out on to the icy streets to begin her search. However bad she was feeling, her mother and grandmother were probably feeling much worse. In Cologne there had been what had seemed to be armies of middle-aged and elderly women, toiling amid the ruins of their city, extracting with their bare hands bricks that could be used for the rebuilding of houses. It wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility that her mother and grandmother were also Trummerfrauen, ‘rubble women’. Every city she had passed through on her way to Heidelberg had had them. In Heidelberg, they were picking clean a bomb site behind the Rathaus. With fear and hope, Christina searched every weary, defeated face. None were familiar and, when she clambered to join them and showed them her photographs of her mother and grandmother, none of them recognized Eva or Jacoba.

  None of the residents living in the shadow of the Heiliggeistkirche recognized them either, nor any of the residents of Hauptstrasse nor Ingrimstrasse nor Schlosstrasse.

  At the American Headquarters, she was eyed appreciatively, leered at and wolf-whistled at, but given no help or hope. There were no lists of people who had returned to the city, trying to trace family or friends. The names Berger and Frank meant nothing. However, if she wanted a decent meal that evening . . . a night out on the town . . . ?

  Hot and cold, alternately sweating and shivering, the pain behind her eyes almost crippling her, she had declined all hopeful invitations and forced herself to continue with her house-to-house search. It wasn’t an easy task. ‘Berger? Frank?’ Person after person shook their heads. ‘No,’ they said when she showed them the photographs. ‘I don’t recognize them. Don’t know them. Haven’t seen them.’

  By the end of the second day she felt so ill, she could scarcely stand. A doctor was out of the question. She hadn’t enough money on her for a doctor. And she had to finish her search. She had been so sure her mother and grandmother were in Heidelberg. They had to be in Heidelberg, for if they weren’t in Heidelberg, where were they?

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t know them.’

  ‘Don’t recognize them.’

  Dizzyingly, Christina wondered how many people were lying to her. Her grandmother had lived in the city for forty years, her mother had been born there. Some of the people whose doors she had knocked on must have recognized them, even if they hadn’t seen them since their arrest in 1936. And they must have recognized her, too. Why, then, didn’t she recognize anyone? Face after face seemed indistinguishable and blurred. The cobbles she was walking on seemed to shelve away at her feet. In the bitter cold, sweat sheened her face and beaded her eyelashes.

  Her mother and grandmother weren’t here. They weren’t looking for her. They were never going to be reunited. The knowledge was like an avalanche of ice, piercing her to her very soul. They weren’t here, and she was going to have to return home without them. Home. Home! Sobs rose in her throat at the thought of Magnolia Square; at the thought of the green, gorse-flecked expanse of the Heath; of the Thames as it coiled its stately way past Greenwich, thick with tugs and ships.

  She wanted to be home, back in that little triangle of southeast London she had come to love with all her heart. She wanted to hear the cry of rag-and-bone men; the clop and rattle of Albert’s horse-drawn hearse-cum-vegetable cart; the rattle of Rose’s tricycle wheels as she veered into the pathway of number eighteen; Nellie’s cackling laughter; Carrie’s throaty chuckles. She wanted to smell fish and chips; pie, mash and eels; tripe and onions done in milk; steak and kidney pudding. She wanted to be home and, above all, she wanted to be with Jack.

  She was once again at the bottom of Augustinerstrasse, and she leaned against a house wall for support. Jack. In not taking him into her confidence, in excluding him from the obsession that had taken over her life, had she ruined her relationship with him for ever? If she had, she would never be able to forgive herself, not even if she lived to be an old, old lady. She knew that she had to push herself away from th
e wall, that she had somehow to make her way back to the room she had rented, but she couldn’t move. If she moved, her legs would give way. How was she going to begin her journey back to England when she didn’t have the strength to walk even a few yards? What if she never saw England again – never saw Jack again?

  She wanted to be with him again so much she ached for him down to her fingertips. She wanted to be with him so much that, far down the street she could practically see him, talking to a woman on a doorstep, broad-shouldered and lean-hipped, his thick shock of unruly dark hair tumbling low over his brows. The door closed and the broad-shouldered, lean-hipped figure turned away and looked down Augustinerstrasse. Hazel eyes met hers.

  As her legs buckled beneath her she heard him shout, ‘Tina! TINA!’ and then he was sprinting towards her, terror and relief fighting for supremacy on his hard-boned face.

  ‘Tina! Oh my God!’ His arms were round her, cradling her to him. ‘I thought I was never going to find you, Tina! I thought I was going to be searching this Goddamned country for ever!’

  ‘You’ve come for me?’ She stared dazedly up into his dearly loved face, hardly daring to believe that he wasn’t a hallucination. ‘You’re going to take me home?’

  He rocked her against him, tears of relief and thankfulness streaming down his face. ‘Yes,’ he said, his voice raw with the depth of his love. ‘I’m going to take you home, Tina – back to England, back to London, back to Magnolia Square.’