by Jean Little
The Troubled Times
“ARE YOU GOING to Gerda’s tonight, Papa?” Anna asked.
“Not tonight,” Papa told her. He looked troubled. “Tomorrow night I will go, Liebling. Maybe by then everything will be all right.”
Anna knew he was saying that because she was a child. Papa himself did not believe things were going to be all right. Anna prayed he was wrong.
The next morning Gerda was at school but she did not speak to anyone. Anna stood near her when she could do it without being too obvious. She almost said, more than once, “Don’t worry, Gerda. My father is coming to your house tonight. He will find some way to fix things. He will find out where your father is.”
But she remembered the look on Papa’s face, as though he knew more than he was saying. She did not want Gerda to hope if there really was no hope.
Gerda did not seem to see Anna hovering close to her. All day long her face looked as if it were behind shutters.
“Pay attention, Gerda,” Frau Schmidt snapped.
There was a second’s silence. Then Gerda’s voice said mechanically, “Yes, Frau Schmidt.”
That night, as soon as the Soldens were finished eating, Papa went over to the Hoffman house.
“Maybe it is dangerous, Ernst,” Mama said, just as he was leaving.
“Maybe I can help,” he said and went.
He was home much too soon. When he opened the door, Anna whirled around, hoping, hoping that she would see in his face that Herr Hoffman had come home safely.
“They’ve left Frankfurt,” he said instead. “If only I had gone earlier … but I don’t suppose it would have made any difference.”
The next day in school, Anna Solden sat still listening to the buzz of rumours.
“Herr Hoffman took all their money with him.”
“They went to her aunt in Rotterdam.”
“I heard they went to Berlin.”
“You’re both crazy. Johann Mitter told me himself that they’d gone to England.”
There was a subdued outburst of laughter at that. Johann could always be counted on for a wild story.
“He’s lying, same as always,” Else Kronen scoffed. “My big brother was talking to the Hoffmans’ neighbours and Frau Hoffman left a letter with them to give to Herr Hoffman if he shows up there looking for them. She wouldn’t even tell the neighbours where they were going. But you know how Gerda talked about that farm in Austria where they used to go in the summers.…”
I’m not saying anything, Gerda, Anna thought. I’m still your friend.
She sat very still waiting for the Assembly. It had been so wonderful to have Gerda single her out to confide in. Of course, there had been nobody else there at first and maybe Gerda had felt safe talking to her because nobody else did. Not often anyway. She was too stupid.
It had started on the very first day, long ago now, when Anna had begun her struggle with the alphabet. To her, many of the letters looked the same. If the letters had stayed still on the page it might have been easier to tell them apart, but when Anna peered at them, they jiggled. She hoped someone else would say something about this. But nobody did, and Anna was afraid to mention it herself. So she held the book closer and closer, trying to make the letters behave.
Then Frau Schmidt had called her to the front to take her turn reciting what she had learned. The teacher used a pointer to spear letters on the blackboard.
“What is this, Anna?” she asked.
Anna did not know. She could not even see it clearly. She stood tongue-tied with shame and didn’t make a sound.
“Aren’t you Anna Solden?” the teacher asked.
Anna nodded, still unable to speak.
“The sister of Rudolf and Gretchen and the twins?”
Anna nodded again. Her cheeks burned.
“Stand up straight, child, and answer properly. You should say, ‘Yes, Frau Schmidt.’”
Somehow Anna straightened.
“Yes, Frau Schmidt,” she whispered.
The teacher clicked her tongue against her teeth impatiently.
“Not in a mumble. Speak out,” she commanded.
She waited. Anna was trembling by that time. She wondered if she might be going to fall down in front of the whole class. She did not fall.
“Yes, Frau Schmidt,” she repeated, praying it was all right.
“Again,” rapped out the teacher.
“Yes, Frau Schmidt,” Anna said.
“Now let me see if you can name this letter yet,” Frau Schmidt said.
Anna could not name the letter. She guessed desperately but her guesses were wrong.
“Oh, go and sit down,” the teacher said at last. She watched Anna stumble back to her desk. Then she added mockingly, “I understand your father is an English master in one of the exclusive schools. Perhaps he can teach you something!”
The class laughed. Perhaps they were afraid not to, but Anna did not think of that. She still remembered their laughter.
That had been over a year before. Anna had not yet learned to read. Papa did try to help but he taught English to high-school boys. He could not figure out what was wrong between Anna and the alphabet. But if she could not read, she now could stand up straight. She no longer trembled. She stood stiffly, answered clearly, and hated Frau Schmidt with her whole heart.
And she hated reading too. She did not care that she could not do it. She did not want to do it. Why should she? Papa would read to her and Papa loved her just the same, whether she could read or not. She would never read and she would never be friends with the children who laughed at her.
Still, deep inside, it did hurt her that Gerda had not even said goodbye. She had ached so for Gerda in her aloneness and fear. And not once did she, Anna, join in the cruel gossip about where Herr Hoffman might be.
“He’s run away with an actress, Johann Mitter says,” was one of the stories.
Anna spoke right out against that one.
“He did not,” she said.
The others pelted questions at her, really seeing her for once.
“How do you know?”
“Where is he then?”
“Who told you?”
Anna stared back at them defiantly but silently. She had no proof. She just knew. Gerda’s father wouldn’t.
“Oh, she doesn’t know anything,” Olga Müller dismissed her. “As usual,” she added.
They turned away in disgust.
But Anna was sure she was right. Something must have gone terribly wrong to keep Herr Hoffman from coming home. It was part of the “troubled times” Papa had spoken about.
“Anna, you cannot afford to sit and dream,” Frau Schmidt snapped. “Not if you want to finish the Primer.”
“Yes, Frau Schmidt,” she said automatically.
She opened the book she could not read and prepared for another day at school.
A week later, she wakened in the night to hear Mama shouting.
“Leave Germany! Ernst! How could we?”
Papa’s voice rumbled some reply. Anna shook her head, still foggy with sleep, and listened harder.
“But this is our home!” Mama was more upset than Anna had ever heard her. “We’ve lived here all our lives. Ernst, I was born not three blocks from this very house. Our friends are here. What about your sister?”
Papa spoke again but though Anna strained her ears, she could only catch occasional words and phrases.
“ … must be brave … think of the Hoffmans … can’t you understand …”
He said something about June too. Anna remembered how angry he had been then over some new law. Something about Jews not working for the government … Oh, she couldn’t remember although she could see him pacing up and down, his eyes flashing. She had not known he could get that angry.
Mama was still arguing.
“But where would we go? Ernst, you are not thinking. What of the children’s schooling? Your darling Anna is failing now.”
The listening child smiled in
the darkness. What if she were failing? Even Mama knew she was Papa’s “darling Anna.”
“What will happen to her if she is uprooted? And Rudi will probably be Head Boy next term. Anyway we don’t have enough money.”
At last Papa’s voice came strongly through the wall.
“I know all this as well as you do, Klara. But I know much more. Don’t you understand that if I were not working in a private school, I would be out of work right now? How long will the new regime overlook the staff at private schools? Remember that Tania’s husband is Jewish.”
“But what does your sister’s husband have to do with us?” Beneath her anger, Mama sounded bewildered.
“Oh, Klara, think. Think of the Hoffmans. What happened to him I don’t dare guess. Think of Nathan Jakobsohn. Think of the Wechslers. And I heard today that Aaron Singer has been dismissed.”
“Ernst, that can’t be true. Dr. Singer made that company famous.”
“Everyone knows that. But he was dismissed nevertheless. No reasons given. He is going to try to get out of Germany. Soon, I am certain, it will be harder to leave. It is not just the Jews who are in danger, Klara. Anyone who disagrees, anyone who speaks up too loudly …”
There was a tense silence. Anna chewed on her fist.
“But your brother Karl is your only relative not in Germany — and he’s in Canada!” Mama wailed.
Anna knew that to Mama, Canada was faraway and foreign. Mama had no use for anything “foreign.”
Papa yawned suddenly, so widely Anna heard his jaws crack.
“Enough. I’m tired out, Klara. But we must think. If anything happens, we will need to be ready. I wish to God I were wrong about the whole thing.”
“I am sure you are wrong,” Mama said.
Anna heard her turn over. The bed squeaked. Then Papa added, so softly that Anna nearly missed it, “I made a promise to Anna which I must keep.”
“Made what promise to Anna? That you would take us all away from our home?”
“No, not that,” Papa said wearily.
Anna had her ear against the wall now, so that she could hear even though his voice dropped.
“I told her she would grow up where thoughts are free,” he said.
Had he promised her that? Oh, yes. The song Herr Keppler would not sing. But Mama was storming again.
“So we must all change our lives for your Anna! Why, she is the one of all the children who most needs to stay right here. She is only beginning to learn now. Frau Schmidt says she is stubborn … but whatever is wrong, making her start all over again in a new place would be the worst thing in the world for her!”
Anna shuddered. This time, Mama was right. Frau Schmidt was terrible, but some stranger …!
Please, Papa, she begged him silently, let us stay here.
Then, incredibly, Klara Solden laughed, an everyday, teasing, comfortable laugh.
“Ernst, you have forgotten how unimportant we are,” she said, making nonsense out of all they had been saying. “Why, what could happen to us? Maybe Herr Hoffman’s wife was a nag. Maybe Dr. Singer presumed somehow or is getting too old. But we are nobody. Oh, my feet are cold. Put yours over here.”
“Klara, Klara,” Papa moaned, but his voice had a faint note of laughter in it too, “you are impossible.”
Their voices sank to a murmur. Anna slid back down in bed not knowing whether to worry or not. At last she drifted back into sleep.
She wakened once before morning. There was no sound from her parents’ room. For an instant, she was frightened all over again. Then she thought of Mama’s cold feet and smiled as she curled up snugly under her own warm covers.
Mama won’t let Papa do anything terrible, she thought.
At breakfast everything was the way it had always been. Anna was relieved, though somehow slightly disappointed too. Then at supper Papa made an announcement. It was nothing Anna had expected. But it was terrible enough.
“This family is going to learn to speak English,” he said.
His wife and children stared at him. He smiled in return but there was something in that smile which nobody liked.
“We will start right now,” he went on, proving their worst fears correct. “From now on, every night, we will speak nothing but English at our evening meal. All of you children, except Anna, have studied some English at school, so you have made a start already,” he encouraged them.
“I know no English,” Mama said, her face hard.
“You will learn, Klara,” Papa said quietly. “We will begin right now. Listen carefully. Rudi, will you pass me the salt, please?”
The English words sounded like gibberish to Anna. Rudi looked at the pepper, the salt, the mustard. His hand went out slowly. It hovered. Then, uncertainly, it dropped. Luck was with him. He did hand his father the salt.
“Thank you, son,” Papa said, taking it.
Rudi’s worried look vanished instantly. He glanced around at the others to be sure they had not missed his cleverness. Everyone looked suitably impressed.
But Papa had only started.
“How was school today, Gretchen?” he wanted to know.
Any other time it would have been fun to watch Gretchen get so flustered.
“How … how … I know not,” she stammered.
“It was good, Papa,” Rudi put in quickly, brilliantly.
But Gretchen had recovered. She shot her brother a nasty look.
“School was fine, Papa,” she said.
Was one right and the other wrong? Anna did not have any idea. It would be wonderful if Rudi had made a mistake already. But suppose Papa turned on her, Anna, next?
This is one million times worse than that alphabet, Anna thought dismally. She tried to sit lower in her chair so that Papa would not see her.
For him it was easy, of course. He actually loved English. He had gone to college in a place called Cambridge. Anna had seen pictures of the river there, of great leaning trees and of young men laughing into the camera. Papa had lots of English books and he read them for fun. He even got English magazines in the mail and he taught English all day long to the boys at Saint Sebastian’s.
With a little practice, Rudi and Gretchen did surprisingly well. But it wasn’t all just due to their brilliance, as Rudi claimed. He had been learning English in school for four years now and Gretchen for three. The twins had only had one year of it and they made hundreds of mistakes. Mama and Anna were the only two who knew nothing at all about it.
At first they got away with speaking German to each other in spite of Papa. In those days, there was a closeness between them which Anna had not known since she was a baby. She knew that then Mama had cuddled her and had sung to her. There were pictures of her on Mama’s knee and Mama’s smile at her was beautiful. Anna loved those pictures. But she could not remember, or only barely, a time when she was not a disappointment to her mother.
Even before she had gone off to school, it had started. Anna couldn’t run without tripping over some bump in the uneven pavement. Anna could not skip. Anna never could catch a ball unless it was rolled along the ground to her. She could learn poems. Papa loved to hear her recite them. But Mama had no time for poems. She wanted a daughter who could at least dust furniture properly.
“Anna, look at all that dust!” she would cry when Anna thought she had finished.
Anna would look and, although she saw no dust at all, she would lower her head in shame.
But now things were different. The two of them would sit and listen to Frieda working so hard to say, “Thank you.”
“Tank you, Papa,” she would say.
“Put your tongue between your teeth, Frieda, like this. Watch me. Th … th … ” Papa would demonstrate.
Even Rudi had trouble with the “th” sound.
Then, right in the middle, Anna would whisper to her mother that she wanted more milk. She whispered in German, of course, and Mama answered “Ja, ja, Liebling,” and passed it at once. Papa would frown but Anna would sip
her milk and feel special and she hardly even cared, much as she loved him.
“My one German child,” Mama said fondly on those first evenings. And Anna basked in the sunshine of Mama’s smile while it lasted.
Soon enough, she knew, Mama would want to teach her to knit again. Or to sew! That was worse. Gretchen and Frieda were so quick. But Anna simply could not see what Mama meant. She did not understand how, to start with, Mama got the thread through the needle. When Anna looked at the thin needle in her hand, there was no hole there waiting.
More than once she had almost told Mama that. But always, the next instant, Mama had slid the thread through and was looking at her youngest child with such exasperation that Anna did not know how to explain.
In Mama’s needle, there was a hole every time.
Maybe if she held the material closer …
“No, no, child,” Mama said, “you’ll strain your eyes that way. Hold it like this in your lap.”
Again her mother sounded so sure. Anna struggled on and got nowhere. Before long, they all grew used to her even though they never stopped trying to improve her.
“Let me, Anna,” Gretchen would sigh, taking the pot holder from her. “How can you make such huge crooked stitches?”
“Here, Anna. I’ll fix it. Really, I cannot understand you. I was knitting socks for my brothers when I was seven.”
That was Mama. Gloom closed over Anna. She shut her mouth tight and did not let her hands shake. It was like school and that alphabet. But she would not care. She was Papa’s pet even if she wasn’t Mama’s. Everyone knew that, just as they knew that Mama loved Rudi best, however she denied it.
But now, for a while at least, Anna was Mama’s one German child. Oh, Mama still frowned and shook her head over her often but she sang her German songs too, and both of them pretended there were no such things as troubled times.
Anna fought not to remember Gerda, not to wonder where she was and whether her father had ever found them.
She did not waken again to hear her parents quarrelling.
It was a good winter, a lovely spring. She took it for granted that the storm had blown over, that eventually Papa would even forget about the English lessons.
Then one morning early in June, 1934, a letter came from Canada. It was not from Uncle Karl; it was from his lawyer.