by Cathy Gohlke
“So, you understand. Prejudice does not disappear because laws change. Even losing a war rarely changes the passions of the fallen.” He pushed back from the table. “In America there is a saying, I think: ‘Does the apple not fall near the tree?’”
“I’m not like Grandfather. I despise prejudice. I marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for civil rights in 1963. I took the bus to Washington, DC. I was only eighteen years old, but I knew right from wrong.”
“Civil disobedience.”
“Civil disobedience, but conscientiously required.”
“Perhaps the apple does not fall far from the mother-tree after all.”
“For the first time in my life, I hope that’s true.”
Carl smiled and threw coins to the table. “My parents are ready to receive us.”
I don’t know what I expected, but Carl’s parents looked so much older than Mama and Daddy had. I supposed they must be older—Carl himself had been ten years old when the war ended and he was the youngest of three children. His mother served coffee and cake at the kitchen table.
“Your mother was a brave woman,” Herr Schmidt remembered. “She bought and sold on the black market to feed many. It was dangerous, so very dangerous.”
I felt Carl sit back.
“For Jews? She was buying for Jews? Did she hide them herself?”
“Nein!” Frau Schmidt intervened. “She was but a girl; where would she hide them, and her Vater a member of the Nazi Party? He—”
Herr Schmidt placed a hand over his wife’s. “Remember, Helga, Hannah is the granddaughter of Herr Sommer.”
“Please, I understand that my grandfather embraced Nazi political views during the war. I don’t know what my mother did.”
The older couple exchanged a meaningful glance.
“It wasn’t only that he embraced Nazi political views,” Herr Schmidt said. “Many did that.”
“Vater, perhaps you should begin with the church.”
“Ja, ja, that is good.” Herr Schmidt pulled a pipe from his pocket, tamped the tobacco, and lit it, the ritual helping him step back in time. “Do you know of the Confessing Church?”
“Carl told me a little about it. That’s all I know.”
“Some saw early that the Reich was trying to replace the church’s doctrine with its own, that Herr Hitler was trying to stand in the place of our one true teacher, Jesus Christ. Men and women banded together to confess Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. Many—not all—also stood against the maltreatment of our Jewish brethren.”
“Especially after Hitler declared that Christian Jews were not really Christian.” I remembered what Carl had told me.
“It never mattered to the Reich if Jews were Christians or Communists or Orthodox or atheists. To them they were a people to be eliminated. And so they began.”
Frau Schmidt spoke up. “But that’s when some in the Confessing Church stood up and began to help the Jews in a more concerted effort.”
“Some more than others,” Carl nearly accused. “Not everyone helped.”
“Ja,” Herr Schmidt replied, “this is true, and to our shame.” The prolonged glance and tension between father and son was confusing. “Your mother, God rest her soul, was one who helped.”
“She was fearless.” Frau Schmidt’s eyes watered. “And she was faithful. Do not let anyone tell you otherwise.”
“Please, I beg of you, tell me about her.”
“When we met your mother, she was already deeply involved. About the time her mother died—your Grossmutter—she began coming to church with the Kirchmann family.”
“‘Kirchmann’? Did you say ‘Kirchmann’?” Mama and Daddy’s wedding certificate flashed through my brain.
“Ja, ja.” She nodded. “Frau Kirchmann became, I think in many ways, a second mother for Lieselotte.”
Herr Schmidt snorted. “It was not Frau Kirchmann who drew her.”
“No.” His wife smiled. “It was Lukas. I believe Lieselotte loved Lukas since she was a child. He was her older brother’s friend.”
“Uncle Rudy.” I made the connection, but the name resounding in my ears was Lukas. Who was this Lukas Mama loved? And if she loved him, could he . . . ?
“Ja. Only the young men divided paths when the Sommer boy joined the Wehrmacht. He never came home. Lukas’s father arranged for his son some kind of ‘essential war work’ with the Abwehr—the intelligence-gathering organization—that kept him out of the army.”
“But all the while the Kirchmanns helped Jews—hiding them, moving them across the borders into Belgium and the Netherlands, some even to France and, through others farther south, to Switzerland.” Frau Schmidt shook her head. “They were daring, and your mother with them.”
“They weren’t alone,” Carl insisted. “A number of Confessing Church members helped.”
“Ja, but not many in such direct ways. The Kirchmanns stole ration cards, forged identity cards, siphoned Benzin from the trucks of the Gestapo. They were brazen, and fearless,” Frau Schmidt repeated.
“Or foolish,” Herr Schmidt reproved. “They risked their lives and all those connected with them. In the end they were caught.”
The Schmidts exchanged their worried glance once more.
“Tell me, please.”
Herr Schmidt began, “Lieselotte and Lukas had just announced their engagement in the church that Sunday.”
“It was not a secret.” Frau Schmidt poured more tea. “The announcement appeared in the newspaper—such a happy couple. I remember hearing your Grossvater did not approve Lukas’s lack of involvement in the Party. Still, he held a grand event to celebrate their engagement, in his home. He invited his Nazi friends—a good chance to show off his newfound wealth, to make his way into their social circle, I always thought. Lieselotte and the Kirchmanns were terribly afraid of such exposure, but determined to carry it off. It was the kind of thing they did, part of their ruse to keep above suspicion.”
“Something must have happened that night.” Herr Schmidt puffed on his pipe. The air grew thick and Frau Schmidt waved the smoke away. “We never knew what. But the next day—late in the afternoon—Herr Kirchmann came to the door and left a package.”
“He left it with me.” Carl’s color deepened. “My parents were out and he asked me to give it to them—asked that we get it to one of the other church members. He said they were going away—that they must go away very soon. It had all been arranged by Lieselotte’s father. I can see Herr Kirchmann standing in the doorway as if it were yesterday.”
“It was over twenty-five years ago, Carl,” his mother admonished.
“And every day I relive it. We should have done as he asked. It was so little to ask!”
“I don’t understand.” I glanced from Schmidt to Schmidt.
“Herr Kirchmann had risked his life to gain a dozen passports and new identity papers for Jews in hiding. He said he must go away, that they would no longer be able to help as they had before. So he asked that we get the passports to them.”
Herr Schmidt removed his pipe and I saw the lines in his forehead deepen. “I take responsibility. I refused to deliver them, refused to allow Carl to deliver them. It would have put my family in jeopardy. If caught, I would have been sent to prison; my family would have starved. They might have taken us all away.” All these years later, Herr Schmidt sounded weak, but defensive.
“It was a choice made daily by the Kirchmanns, by a dozen others, but we broke the circle,” Frau Schmidt whispered. “And for that break—for our refusal to help—a dozen Jews were sent to camps.”
“A dozen Jews died,” Carl insisted.
Herr Schmidt’s hands trembled. “I have not forgotten that day, have never forgiven myself.”
“It was not your decision alone,” Frau Schmidt replied softly. “I, too, was afraid. I was the one who threw them into the fire.”
I didn’t know what to say, how to comfort or reprieve them . . . if I even had that right, if I believed I shoul
d. “I was afraid . . . a dozen Jews died . . .”
“That night the Kirchmanns disappeared,” Herr Schmidt went on, “they were taken into hiding. Herr Sommer had arranged passage for them—that was all he told Carl. We didn’t know where or how. But the Gestapo discovered their hiding place and came early the next morning to arrest them—all of them.”
“Except Marta,” Frau Schmidt added.
“Yes, except Marta.”
“Who is Marta?” I’d not heard that name before.
“The younger Kirchmann child—she and Lieselotte were of an age, fast friends, like sisters. Later she told us she’d snuck out, saying good-bye to a school friend, when the Gestapo came. Because of that, she was saved, and hidden by members of the church until the end of the war.”
“And that’s when Mama ran away? Did she try to follow them?”
Herr Schmidt shook his head. “We don’t know for certain. Only that she disappeared the same night.”
Frau Schmidt smoothed her hand over the pinned rolls in my hair. “I think . . .” She hesitated. “Herr Sommer may have been the one to report them.”
“Sold them to the Reich.” I glanced at Carl, remembering his words, but still did not want to believe. “You can’t know that. You have no proof.”
Herr Schmidt set his pipe on the table. “When we learned that the Kirchmanns had been taken, I went to the pastor of our church—Pastor Braun. I meant to tell him what I knew, what Carl had heard the day before about them leaving.”
“Yes?”
“Frau Braun said that Pastor had been taken earlier that morning. She said she would go to Lieselotte’s father and beg his help for his daughter’s sake.”
“What happened?”
Herr Schmidt would not look at me. “Frau Braun never returned home. Pastor Braun did not survive the camp.”
“You’re certain Grandfather didn’t try to help them—any of them?”
Herr Schmidt set his pipe on the table. “They were uncertain times.”
“No one dared ask, or talk to another about such things. No one risked trusting his neighbor. They might denounce you. It was not uncommon for children—brainwashed in the Hitler Youth—and brownshirts to denounce their own parents,” Frau Schmidt all but pleaded for me to understand.
My stomach nearly scraped the floor. “What happened to the Kirchmanns?”
“Helmeuth—Herr Kirchmann—and Lukas were sent first to Dachau, and then somewhere else. We lost track. We heard only—months after the war—that Helmeuth and his wife had died in the camps.”
“And what about Mama’s fiancé? What about Lukas?”
Herr Schmidt shook his head. “He came back—after the war. Marta took him in. But he was a broken man.”
After the war . . . Mama and Daddy were married in 1945. Why did she marry Daddy if Lukas was alive? Did she not know that he’d survived? “Is he alive now?”
“I do not know. We never saw him—it’s just what we heard. I cannot imagine it, but we have seen neither of them for many years.”
“Does Marta live in Berlin?”
“We don’t know where she lives now.”
“The envelopes.” Carl pressed my hand. “The envelopes you showed me. I didn’t recognize the address. I meant to ask you, Vater, if you knew it.”
“I left them in the car—in my purse. Carl, would you—”
“I’ll get them.”
Carl’s absence left a giant hole in the room, but I couldn’t bring myself to fill it. What do I say to them? How do I even feel about what they did—what they failed to do? Would I have done any better? Mama did.
Carl was back in thirty seconds and I pulled them from my purse. “Here. The writing is old—faint. The stamped dates look like they’re mostly from the early fifties.”
“Ja, ja—this is it.” Herr Schmidt squinted at the envelope. “Danziger Strasse, 143.”
“This is what?”
“The Kirchmanns’ address—before they were taken away. It is in East Berlin today, beyond the wall. But the name has changed . . . let me think.”
“Dimitroffstrasse,” Frau Schmidt said.
“Ja, that is it.”
My heart beat faster. “That means Marta or Lukas wrote to Mama after the war, after I was born. Is there a chance they’re still living there, or that relatives or friends are still in the neighborhood?”
“Nein. I told you, they moved away—I don’t know where. They had no other relatives, though perhaps there are others from the church of those days who would know Marta, and where she moved. Frau Kirchmann came from Austria—long before the war, before Hitler came to power. Perhaps they returned there.”
“Mama always claimed she was Austrian.”
“Your Mutter? Nein, she was German. Only Frau Kirchmann was Austrian.” Frau Schmidt sounded positive.
“Could they have married—before the arrest?”
“I do not see how. The engagement celebration came just two days before the Gestapo.”
My heart fell.
Carl must have seen my disappointment. “Marta would know. She might be the only one who would know.”
“She would at least know if Lukas is still alive,” I all but pleaded.
“Why is it important to find Lukas now? After your mother is dead and all these years have gone? If he is alive, this could only bring him sad memories.” Herr Schmidt tamped his pipe again.
Frau Schmidt covered his arm with her hand. “Because she wants to better know her Mutter—the girl her Mutter once was. And perhaps—” she glanced sympathetically toward me—“your Vater?”
24
LIESELOTTE SOMMER
SEPTEMBER 1944
Just after midnight our party ended. The hours stole the luster from Vater, but Fräulein Hilde still shone like the midday sun as she graciously thanked our guests for coming. Dr. Peterson shadowed the edges of the room and lit a cigarette, making no move to leave.
I had no chance to warn Lukas or his parents—and nothing to say. It was simply a feeling, a sick feeling in my stomach based on Dr. Peterson’s innuendos and facial expressions—his very body language. But his presence shook me as though all my anchors had been cut and I was drifting, slowly but perilously, out to sea.
Before I excused myself, I thanked Fräulein Hilde and mein Vater, making certain they knew how very much the evening meant to Lukas and me, how we looked forward to sharing our wedding day with them. Still Dr. Peterson stayed.
I bid them all good night and made for the stairs, my ears perked for anything that might be said.
“It was a grand success,” Fräulein Hilde gloated.
“Thanks to you, my dear,” Vater crowed.
“A grand success and a very long day. I’ll bid you good night, Wolfgang. Dr. Peterson, go home and give this poor man rest. He’s played the victor’s role tonight—and played it well.” I heard the satisfaction in her voice as I reached the top stair. I couldn’t wait longer without being noticed, so I went to my room. Minutes later I heard Fräulein Hilde’s car drive away and the latch close on Vater’s library door.
After tonight’s social statement before the Nazi Party members Vater and Fräulein Hilde so wanted to impress, I couldn’t imagine what Dr. Peterson could complain about. Lukas and I had comported ourselves admirably, and the Kirchmanns had engaged in witty conversation at every level.
But the telegram—what could that be? What more could there be to his Heyden Fulstrom story? Even if Dr. Peterson contacted Heyden again, even if he and his friend on duty swore that I’d kissed Lukas in public and that Lukas had been with another young woman, that would only show my inappropriate expression of passion for him—not worth a fuss now that we were about to marry. They couldn’t prove Anna was Jewish—not now. The Levys were well hidden away in the cellar of friends. It had been stupid of me to claim Anna was my cousin, but I could put that down to my foolishness or nervousness at being questioned by guards in the street.
I changed into my nightdress a
nd turned out the light, then crawled into bed and reviewed everything I could imagine. Just before falling asleep I remembered the car that had slowed when I’d checked my bicycle chain earlier in the week. Had it come from behind me or before me? I rolled over, uncertain of my memory. That was days ago. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep.
For all my worry and the previous night’s excitement, I slept until seven. Vater had already left the house. Perhaps my fears were unfounded after all. I breakfasted in my room, eager to escape the hustle and bustle downstairs and to plan my day. How soon could I see Lukas? The very thought warmed me through.
I’d promised to meet Fräulein Hilde at the dressmaker’s for one final fitting of my going-away suit and luncheon on the terrace of her favorite hotel. It would provide a suitable opportunity for her to glory in the success of last night’s dinner and for me to thank her once again for all she’d done.
I’d dressed to go out and was just pulling on my gloves and adjusting my hat in front of the hallway mirror when Vater walked through the front door. I glanced up, smiling, glad to be at last on comfortable terms with him. His barely controlled fury met my eyes.
“What is it? What’s the matter?”
He grabbed my elbow and ushered me none too gently into the library, closing the door.
“Vater? What is it? What’s happened?” My mind ran through every possible scenario that might produce such anger—none of them good.
“‘What is it? What’s happened?’” he mimicked. “Do you take me for a fool, Lieselotte—a fool? Is it your quest to ruin me, to destroy everything I’ve built?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But fear sped through my veins.
“How long have you known about Frau Kirchmann?”
“Frau Kirchmann? Known what?”
“‘Known what?’” he mimicked again, then pulled a telegram from inside his breast pocket and threw it on the desk before me. “Known this! Known that she is Jewish!” He spat the word.
“She’s not,” I pled. “Frau Kirchmann is Austrian—they’re Austrian! Her parents—”