Shining Through

by Susan Isaacs

Then one day I finally got word from home. Just before Easter, Rolf was wrapping the trout I was buying. It was a lot of trout, even if it was only the appetizer; Horst was planning a dinner for twelve and carrying on as if it was the resurrection: a fish course with a cream sauce! no fowl! do not buy meat! I am endeavoring to obtain a spring lamb!

  “You always choose the best fish,” Rolf said.

  I gave him an I-bet-you-say-that-to-all-the-girls look, but I said, “Thank you.”

  “Your employer must be very happy with you.” For a second it didn’t hit me. I thought he’d meant Horst. And then I realized: It was a message.

  “I hope he is,” I said. “He is a fine man. I am honored to work for him.”

  Don’t trust anyone. But at the end of February, there had been a mass roundup of the remaining Jews in Berlin. The SS called it Fabrik Aktion. Operation Factory. Everybody knew about it. Nobody spoke about it. Well, no ordinary people. But Horst did. After four or five pilseners, I heard him through the door, booming at his dinner guest, a Waffen SS general: I hear Goebbels is pleased with the roundup of the Jews. The general responded through a mouthful of potatoes: Not so pleased. We estimate there are still four thousand we have not picked up.

  The last week of April, I couldn’t stand it. I had to know about my family. I had to trust Rolf. I slipped a note into a haddock. “My friend, if you read these papers and not just pass them on, could you find out for me what has happened to two old ladies, Jews, Liesl and Hannah Weiss, who live, or used to live, on Klarrenstrasse (I do not know the number). If you tell me to try the codfish, I will know you were not able to find out any information. Please, do not put yourself in any danger. This is merely a matter of curiosity.” I signed it: “Your friend.”

  In the next two weeks, I went to Rolf’s store three times. There was no signal at all from him. And then, on a beautiful day in May when even the inside of the fish store smelled good, he told me to have a look at the turbot. While I was inspecting them, he came up beside me. I glanced at him. He picked up two of the smaller fish and said, “No good.” I understood. I watched as he carried them over to a large trash can on the other side of the store and, one at a time, tossed them into the garbage.

  24

  Bombs scared me as much as the Gestapo. Maybe more, because at least with the Germans I had a chance to use whatever wits I had to save my own life. But when the Russians, and then the RAF Bomber Command, flew over Berlin and dropped a thousand tons of bombs in one day, being clever didn’t help. Cowering in an air raid shelter was about all I could do.

  The bombing began to grow in fierceness in the winter I first came to Berlin, 1942—43, but most of it was in the eastern part of the city, near the airport, and farther north, aimed at the tank and munitions factories. Of course I heard it. At night I’d lie in bed on the top floor of the villa in Dahlem and hear—even feel—low booms; if I’d been in my bed in Ridgewood, I could have convinced myself it was a Mack truck backfiring just across the borough line in Bushwick.

  By the time I left Konrad Friedrichs, I’d learned to sleep through the attacks. Now and then, I’d wake up startled, my forehead and neck all sweaty, at the sound of the “all clear” whistle, but that wasn’t exactly a shocking occurrence; sweet dreams didn’t come in Germany. Still, throughout that winter, a person—like a Hedwig—could live in luxurious suburban safety and only have to put up with a little disturbing background noise…and the strange red haze that hovered over the city each sunrise.

  Not that Hedwig ever saw a sunrise after the milk, honey and touch of brandy—a touch big enough to knock out a hippopotamus—I brought upstairs to her every night. She forgot about her periods completely; now she just whined all the time about her violent headaches. A terrible thing to do to a fellow human being, right? Making some miserable, wretched wreck of a woman drunk every night. Maybe turning her into an alcoholic. Wasn’t it awful? Actually, it didn’t bother me one bit.

  So Hedwig slept through the winter air raids, and the spring ones too. While the SS and the police were executing Fabrik Aktion, rounding up Jews—maybe my two cousins with the quivering, spidery handwriting—and shipping them east, she snored.

  All that spring, I kept remembering what Edward had said about Germany being hell. I wanted so much to talk to him about it, tell him he was right, that hell wasn’t just here in Berlin, with its red sky. This was only headquarters. Hell was where the gas chambers were, with prussic acid filling the lungs of silly old ladies who complained about their dentures. And the tiny lungs of babies.

  I wondered if the Germans had been as efficient as they’d hoped to be with their construction. Probably. You couldn’t get a goddamn cast-iron skillet in the whole city of Berlin, but boy, were they productive when it came to murdering Jews.

  Judenrein. I’d heard it six or seven times from the dining room. Jew-free. The ideal, purified German state that Horst with his satin vests and pimples dreamed of: a perfect Reich for perfect Aryans like him and Hedwig.

  The bombing stayed normal all summer. Well, if you lose electricity, gas and water for weeks at a time, life isn’t normal. But at the villa, where the water truck pulled up to the curb, special door-to-door Nazi VIP service, where Horst came home with boxes of candles every night, life was tolerable.

  Of course, Hedwig kept whining: Cold potato salad and sausage again? War is heck, Hedwig.

  I walked through Berlin. There were no cordoned-off streets anymore with Gestapo and Wehrmacht guards making sure you didn’t see the holes where houses used to be. You can’t hide half a city. Buildings were blasted to rubble, dust. Now and then you’d come upon just a wall standing, looking like the pictures you see of movie scenery in Life—real fronts of Wild West bars or candy stores, but from the side, flat and false.

  I tried not to think of home. New York—rude, pushy, funny: “Huh, lady? Whadaya want?” Even Washington—clean, serious, courtly: “May I help you, ma’am?” Quit it, I told myself. Don’t think of life when you’re in the land of the dead.

  Outside Rolf’s fish store, spread-out newspapers were held down by bricks. (Bricks made great paperweights, and the city had mountains of paperweights.) You were supposed to wipe your shoes on the usual phonied-up casualty lists or the radio listings, to get the shards of window glass out of the soles before you went inside. Who could blame them? The city was made of glass. The farther east you walked on Kurfürstendamm, the less you could ignore the crunch-crunch of glass under your feet; the sidewalk became a dazzling, rough, crackling-loud pathway.

  You’d tread carefully, farther on, and you’d meet up with dazed strangers, who kept pointing: I live in that apartment over there—four rooms. Except they were pointing at air. People wore bandages, eye patches, slings, casts. It was horrible. People wandered around in the early morning, still bleeding from the night before.

  Did I feel sorry for them? You’ve got to be paralyzed not to feel some pity for an old man who’s standing and crying by a pile of rubble, and you see a pair of legs sticking out from under all the pulverized mortar and bricks. His wife’s legs, covered with heavy elastic stockings, the kind to help with circulation problems; she probably hadn’t had time to find her shoes. And you’d have to be numb not to feel for the bewildered little kids who kept calling for their dogs.

  Every time I heard the unmistakable sound of an RAF Mosquito coming close—and you knew what was coming before the “take cover” whistle blew—I’d rush with the crowds, breathless, panicked, to find the nearest bomb shelter. But at the same exact minute when my heart was thudding and my mouth was dry with terror, I wanted to yell, Get ’em! Get ’em! More! More! More!

  So did I feel sorry for them? These people huddled around me in an underground station or the basement of a fruit store were the same people who screamed with pride when Hitler told them of their destiny. I’d heard their screams on the radio in Ridgewood, way back in the early thirties.

  Or if they weren’t the screamers, they were the voters: Cast
your ballot for the man who’ll show the Slav and Czech scum just what German power really is!

  And if they weren’t the voters, they were the watchers. They watched the torchlight parades. They watched the soldiers march, the tanks and cannons roll down the street, and they cheered. They watched their neighbors lose their right to vote, their businesses, their citizenship, their houses and their lives. Maybe they didn’t cheer; maybe they said “Too bad” when the Gestapo came to get Liesl and Hannah—but not too loud; someone might hear them.

  They had welcomed the devil, or at least didn’t say, Hey, get out of here, and he had set up business right smack in the middle of town. So let the good people of Berlin get a little taste of what hell was like. And the answer is no, I wasn’t sorry.

  I lost all sense of time. I was in Berlin forever. The bombing would just keep getting heavier until one day there would be nothing to bomb anymore. November 1943, a whole year after I arrived, was the last time I knew whether it was a Tuesday or a Friday. There were fires burning all the time in the city that month, immense fires; the British had bombed Berlin’s supply of coal, and nearly all the fuel for winter was in flames. I’d come back to the villa and my hair would have patches of black: the huge pieces of soot that drifted down all over the city.

  By December, or it may have been February 1944…It was winter, anyway, and people were chopping down trees in the Grunewald to burn to keep from freezing. That’s when I lost track of the month. But somewhere in that time, the villa was hit. I could hear it coming. Walking through the city, I’d learned to judge, just by the pitch of the whistle a bomb makes, about where it was going to land.

  At ten at night, I heard the whistle. I threw off my blanket, ran into the hall and screamed for Else and Dagmar. Else bolted out of her room, and together we ran down to the next floor and banged on Hedwig’s door. But the bomb exploded before I could even shout, Wake up, you imbecile.

  We were thrown to the floor. It wasn’t a direct hit, because we would have been dead. But close. Even as I heard the blast, I felt the violent change in the air pressure. Oh, dear God! My chest kept moving in and out, but I couldn’t breathe. It was like my lungs had been yanked out.

  And then it was over. Absolute quiet. We pulled ourselves up, to discover that no one in the house had been killed. Horst wasn’t even home; he was at the Philharmonic, getting culture. Of all of us, Dagmar suffered the worst. She’d just made it out of her bedroom when the door of the bathroom down the hall was ripped off its hinges; it went flying past her, but it managed to break her shoulder, her arm and a couple of ribs.

  Else and I, lying on our stomachs, hands over our heads, were cut by slivers of flying glass. Horrible, because later you could feel them under your skin, but you couldn’t see them, much less get them out. And most of them were in my back, so every time I turned or bent over, I got forty or fifty stabs of pain.

  What happened to Hedwig was that her antique clothes cabinet fell down and all her blue robes spilled down on the floor.

  So it didn’t matter one bit what month it was, because when you alternate between being resigned to death and trembling uncontrollably at the thought, it doesn’t really matter if it’s Friday, March 10, 1944, or not.

  When I wasn’t thinking about death, I was thinking about my job—both jobs. It was getting harder to find food, even for Horst, and I worried that he’d decide he didn’t need me, that Hedwig could slice a Kochwurst as well as I could. So far, I’d gotten reprieve after reprieve; the gas line was reconnected, so the oven worked; then someone in the foreign office flew back from Paris and gave Horst veal. So much veal! He and his friends sucked up veal roasts and veal stews and veal fricassees for a couple of weeks.

  On the days I thought my job was pretty safe, I worried about the villa. Forget being a cook. I was also a spy. What if they scored a direct hit and bombed Horst’s study? Then he’d have to work nights at the foreign office, and I’d be stuck in a Nazi kitchen, up to my ears in Gefüllter Fasan.

  One of those nights in ’44, toward the end of winter, wrapped up in a blanket on the cold floor of the basement, waiting for a raid that never happened, I let go of the present and thought, for a second, about going home. I realized that as much as I ached to hear English and to be back in New York, I had no one to go back to. Somewhere at OSS Training School, in a small brown envelope in a metal cabinet, was my wedding ring. Suddenly, it hit me that I hadn’t thought of John for weeks—maybe months. I knew then, for sure, that the ring was going to wind up in some other cabinet, in the Unclaimed Property Office. It would stay there forever. I didn’t want it, not even as a souvenir to stick in the drawer next to my 1939 World’s Fair official embroidered handkerchief.

  So, I thought, here are my choices: I would die, courtesy of a British bomb or German prussic acid; Germany would win the war and I’d be stuck as a cook for the Dreschers the rest of my life; or the Allies would win, and somehow, even if it took years, I’d have a shot at getting home.

  So what if there was no one to go home to? Even if I had to start my life all over again, slinging hash in a diner in Long Island City or working for some fat-mouth lawyer on Court Street in Brooklyn, I wanted to be back in New York more than anything else.

  But I didn’t want to think about it too much, to picture lying on the sand in Rockaway, or drinking a chocolate malted, or ever really—being now, at last, at age thirty-five, of sound mind—finding my one true love. Because if it came down to dying, unfulfilled dreams would make death hurt even more. I’d rather check out with a few bittersweet memories: of John, of at least not dying an old maid, and of having done a good turn for the red, white and blue. I had enough regrets, like not seeing my mother before she died. And not, all those years, ever having had the guts to say, Hey, you want to know what kind of a name Voss is? It’s Jewish. I hadn’t even had the courage to admit it to Edward, the one person who knew me better than anyone, and knew the truth.

  Edward Leland was my biggest regret. I’d slammed the door on that one forever by not resolving our fight, and by leaving that cold, typed letter on his desk: I quit. Then, just to make sure there was nothing to go back to, I’d burned my one last bridge by sneaking behind his back to Norman Weekes. So there was no chance of regaining the best…what? Friendship? Association? The best connection I had ever had. But, I thought, life is full of regrets. And I’ll take life any way I can get it.

  Because, you see, deep down I knew we were going to win the war. It was on every face I saw in the street, in the snappiness of Rolf’s walk as he crossed from one side of the fish store to the other, in the ever-more-downward slump of Horst’s shoulders. Sure, Berliners picked themselves up and tried to put as many pieces together as they could, but there was none of that energy, none of that quiet spirit, none of that zest for life I’d heard in British voices over the radio in those days back in 1940, during the Battle of Britain. The Germans were losers—and they knew it.

  Hedwig took to bed almost permanently in the early spring of 1944, and while that may sound as if it would have been a boon for me, it was really a disaster. I found myself in the exact position I’d been in when she was sniveling away in the parlor; exposed. From her bedroom, she had a panoramic view of the linen closet out in the hall. And I couldn’t rely on her stupors: One minute she’d be snoring, an awful sound, as if she was being forced to gargle with some hideous-tasting mouthwash. And then, just as I put my hand on the door handle of the linen closet, she’d call, “Lina! My milk!”

  “I was coming to see if you were ready for it, Madam.”

  “Well, I am.”

  I couldn’t take that chance night after night, so finally I decided to keep the key. It was a risk, but not the worst I’d ever taken; sneaking into Berlin was not what you’d call the act of a totally balanced person. Besides, I was almost positive the second key had passed from the Jewish family into the Dreschers’ possession unnoticed. Horst had never invited more than twelve people, so there was no need for anyone
to even breathe near those huge tablecloths. I couldn’t see Horst saying, Gee, Hedwig, let’s invite twenty people for a Passover dinner.

  Naturally, I couldn’t walk around twirling the key on a chain. I had to make sure no one could ever associate the key with me, so I prowled through the house, looking for a safe, accessible hiding place; I couldn’t risk keeping it in my room or in the kitchen. Finally I found what I needed.

  There was a tree right by the side door of the house—a door everyone used except for formal occasions—and on it there was a branch barely above eye level. It had a small indentation in its upper side, like a little wood saucer. I could slip out the side door anytime; it was the way to get to the shed where they kept the garbage. I made it a point to always lift the small kitchen garbage pail up, away from me, as if to keep it from dripping. Plopping the key into its tree saucer was a comparative cinch.

  Did I ever need easy access to that key! The German foreign office was buzzing about an invasion of France by the Allies. There was no doubt that it would happen; the only questions were when and where. So I took to sneaking into Horst’s office every night, because it was clear that the invasion would be launched from England, Horst’s territory. Going into his study was like entering a gold mine: There were reports of troop concentrations in England, a feud between the British and the Free French; there were analyses of General Eisenhower’s character and intelligence, and a pile of incompatible accounts on when the invasion would take place, accompanied by maps and by weather and tidal charts.

  Even reading the material the way I did—at three in the morning, while Horst slept upstairs; with a quick glance just to figure out what was worth writing home about; and then trying to write those teeny letters wearing cotton gloves and by flashlight—I knew: Not only were their agents in disagreement, but their meteorologists were at each other’s throats. But the OSS could make something out of all the facts and figures, because they knew which information was accurate; the more stuff I could give them, the more they would know about what the Germans suspected.