Gertz saw Benjamin and me from a distance, pointed, and said, “There they are!”
Suddenly he ran toward us, leading a huge group of boys.
“Karl, what do we do?” Benjamin said as they came toward us.
“Run!”
We dropped our books and took off toward the exit stairwell at the far end of the hall. I flew down the stairs, jumping three and four steps at a time, with Benjamin close behind me.
“Wait! Karl!” he gasped, as if proximity to me might protect him.
We heard the muffled chant of “Juden, Juden, Juden.” And then the door to the stairwell exploded open behind us, and at least two dozen boys snaked down the stairs in hot pursuit. I made it to the bottom and out the side door that led into our school’s courtyard and sprinted across the courtyard and out the main gate into the street. Benjamin fell behind.
“Karl!” he screamed. “Wait!”
“Juden, Juden, Juden!”
My months of roadwork had given me superior speed and endurance, so I kept pulling farther ahead. I glanced back over my shoulder just as the Wolf Pack caught up to Benjamin. Gertz Diener grabbed him by the back of his jacket and swung him to the ground. Benjamin fell to his knees, and then the other boys swarmed on top of him like ants on a discarded sweet until he was completely covered by the kicking and punching bodies of the other boys.
I felt a twitch of shame at not going back to help him, but I kept running, knowing there was nothing I could do but take a beating myself. I had become a good fighter, but I’d be helpless against a dozen boys. My strength had increased, but had my bravery? As I ran on, I wondered if this act of self-preservation was just my old cowardice chasing me down.
I turned a corner and saw a police officer down the street. For a brief moment my mind seized on the idea of telling the policeman about what was going on. I even started to move toward him, but then I remembered the new laws. Jews were not even citizens anymore, so it was no longer the job of the police to protect us. For all I knew, he might join in on the beating or arrest me. Desperation swept over me as I realized how vulnerable my Jewish blood made me, and I ran on toward our apartment. Along the way, I passed several advertising pillars that had huge sheets with the Nuremberg Laws printed on them for everyone to see.
Bertram Heigel
“YOU WERE WHAT?” MY FATHER GASPED.
“Expelled,” I said. “Not just me. All the Jewish kids were kicked out.”
My mother, my father, Hildy, and I were just sitting down to a meager dinner of boiled potatoes, carrots, and brown bread when I broke the news.
“It’ll only be a matter of time before Hildy’s school follows suit.” My mother sighed.
“I don’t want to go to school anymore anyway,” Hildy said. “It’s awful there.”
“What’ll we do, Sig?” my mother said.
“I don’t have to go to school,” I said. “I can find a job.”
“There are no jobs,” she said.
“Then I can work for Papa.”
“Me too,” Hildy added quickly.
My father cocked his head, intrigued.
“No. You both must go to school,” my mother said. “I’ll not allow them to turn our children into ignorant savages.”
“But only if we can find a school to take them,” my father interjected.
“We’ll send them to a Jewish school,” my mother said.
“A Jewish school?” I said.
“I don’t want my son turned into a rabbi,” my father said.
It felt good for my father and me to be on the same side of an argument for a change.
“Nonsense,” my mother said. “He certainly won’t be harmed by being exposed to the Torah. You went to a Jewish school and survived it.”
“Barely,” he muttered.
“We’ve always taught you children to have open minds,” my mother said. “I’m confident a little Jewish education won’t close them.”
Soon after, Hildy and I were both enrolled in separate Jewish schools not too far from our apartment. My old classmate Benjamin Rosenberg started going to the same school, but we avoided each other. I was ashamed that I had not stopped to help him when he had been overrun by the Wolf Pack. And he was probably either mad at me or just embarrassed for taking the beating.
On the first day in my new classroom, my teacher, Herr Haas, a large man with a thick red beard, called me up to the front of the room. He wore a heavy black suit, and long curls of hair dangled beside his ears.
“Herr Stern, you seem to be missing something.”
“Sir?”
“A yarmulke,” he said, pointing to the small skullcap on his own head.
“I don’t have one,” I admitted.
Several boys gasped, while others chuckled.
“Well, I suggest you get one to wear in school as soon as possible. It is required. For now wear this.”
He reached into his desk drawer and produced a yarmulke made of folded white paper.
“Now, go sit down.”
I returned to my desk, and the boy sitting behind me leaned close and whispered: “How come you don’t wear a yarmulke?”
“Why should I?”
“Why? Because God commands it,” he said.
“I don’t understand why God would care about me wearing a hat. Besides, these days it’s like wearing a target on your head.”
The boy shook his head and leaned back.
Everyone was required to learn Hebrew and study Torah and the Talmud. As one of the only students with absolutely no Jewish observance at home, I was a hopeless Hebrew student, so far behind my contemporaries that I didn’t even try to catch up. In general there were two types of students at the school: the old students who came from more observant families and we new ones who were forced to attend because we had been kicked out of our secular schools.
I felt no connection to the religious Jews and didn’t believe in any of their traditions. Why should God or anyone else care if I ate a pork sausage or walked around without a hat? I reasoned that if everyone could have just been secular, none of this would have happened. The religious Jews didn’t think too highly of the nonobservant kids, including me, either. To them, we were just as strange for being born Jewish but not believing or practicing in any way. I avoided most of the other kids, new and old, focusing all of my social life around the Berlin Boxing Club, Greta Hauser, and my cartooning.
After dinner one night I sat in our living room working on a new comic strip about Barney Ross based on a story I had read in The Ring magazine in which Ross went back to his old neighborhood and defended his rabbi against a group of thugs. As I made the story come to life as a cartoon, it struck me that Ross never wore a yarmulke and yet he considered himself an observant Jew. He was able to balance being a boxer and a proud Jew in a way that was utterly impossible in Germany. I was just finishing the last panel when my father burst into the room, carrying a package.
“There you are. I’ve been looking for you.”
“I was just drawing.”
My father approached, and I instinctively tried to cover what I was working on, but too late. My father frowned as he saw it.
“Comics,” he said with disdain. “I don’t know why you waste so much of your time on something so trivial.”
“It’s not trivial to me.”
“Well, I need you to make a delivery.”
He handed me the package.
“Where?”
“The Countess,” he said. “And make sure you get the cash.”
My heart sank. I dreaded making deliveries to the Countess, as he and his boyfriend, Fritz, always made a fuss about how big and strong I was getting and tried to tempt me inside with a cup of tea. Of course, since I’d begun training, I longed for people to notice the changes in my physique. But not those kinds of people.
And I was happy that my parents continued to do a brisk business with the printing press, although the pickups and deliveries became even more shrouded in
secrecy than before. Sometimes I anonymously dropped packages outside apartment doors and left without collecting the payment, while with other clients I would just go to collect money. My father didn’t want to risk the same person’s being seen too frequently at the same address. My regular clients included the Countess as well as other members of the Berlin underworld—homosexuals, Gypsies, Jews, Communists, anyone whose lifestyle or beliefs forced him or her to live in secret.
Reluctantly I made my way to the Countess’s apartment building, determined to leave as quickly as possible.
When I rang the bell, a man’s voice that I didn’t recognize called from inside. It didn’t sound like Fritz, who sometimes answered the door.
“Who is it?”
“Karl Stern.”
A moment later the door opened to reveal a tall middle-aged man with a balding head ringed by a thin wreath of brown hair.
“Uh . . . is the Countess here?”
“Come in,” he said.
Ordinarily, I would have just dropped the package and left, but I needed to collect the money. My father was very clear about needing to collect on the spot these days whenever possible. The man who answered the door turned and moved toward the sitting room. Suddenly I was seized by the fear that the Countess and Fritz had moved or been arrested and that this was the new occupant of the apartment. The weight of the flyers in my bag felt very heavy, and I knew I couldn’t leave them with a stranger or risk getting everyone in big trouble. I hesitated by the door. Should I run?
“Does the Countess still live here?” I ventured.
The man did not turn.
“Yes, Karl. The Countess is still lurking around here somewhere. She’s just not feeling like herself today.”
He knew my name, so I followed him into the small sitting room near the front door. He sat heavily beside a petite rolltop desk.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” he offered.
“No, thank you.” I replied. I was still afraid of offering up the package to a stranger. “Is Fritz around?”
“Fritz? No, Fritz doesn’t live here anymore,” the man said. “Fritz decided to become a different person because the government doesn’t like the person he really is.”
The man’s voice caught in his throat as if he were on the verge of tears, and I realized whom I was talking to, despite the lack of wig and expert layers of makeup.
“Countess?” I said.
“Yes,” he replied. “Although most people call me Bertram when I look like this. Bertram Heigel—good to meet you,” he said, comically extending his hand. We shook hands.
“I have the package for you.”
“Yes, well, I’m sorry for your trouble coming over here, but I won’t need it this week. In fact I probably won’t be needing them at all anymore with the way things are. My parties have gone dreadfully out of style.”
My mind froze. The Countess was one of our only remaining reliable customers. I had no idea what we’d do if we didn’t have this small but steady flow of income.
“But these have already been printed,” I said, removing the packet from my rucksack.
“Of course I’ll pay for these, but it looks as though I won’t be having any balls anymore, so this will be the last delivery.”
He removed a roll of marks from the desk and handed it over to me, noticing the look of unease on my face as I accepted the money.
“How is the rest of your father’s business?”
I wondered how I should answer that question. My father’s business didn’t really exist anymore. The gallery was forced to officially close after the passing of the Nuremberg Laws, and his private clients seemed to be drying up with each passing week, as more and more of his old associates either were jailed or fled the country. The Countess acknowledged my silence with a nod.
“I see,” he said. “Do you know how I met your father?”
“No,” I said. In fact I really did not want to know. My mind had danced around the edges of the idea that my father had some secret life as a homosexual or cross-dresser or both, but I had tried to bury those thoughts as quickly as they’d come into my head.
“Come over here. I want to show you something.”
He removed a worn leather photo album from a shelf in the desk and opened to a page that featured several photos of young men, boys really, in war uniforms. He pointed to a group photo of six soldiers each holding a rifle in one hand, their free arms slung around one another’s shoulders.
“That’s me on the end. And that’s your father there in the middle. The short one.”
I examined the image of my father from twenty years earlier, looking young and thin. It was hard to conceive that the people in the photograph were really my father and the Countess.
“That photograph was taken just a few days after we completed basic training. I was a terrible soldier. But your father was a born warrior.”
“What?”
“Oh, yes. A natural leader. A great marksman. Always kept cool under fire. Has he not told you anything about the war?”
“Nothing.”
“Do you know that he was awarded an Iron Cross?”
“He would never discuss his experience in the war.”
“Well, there are some things that should be told. It was late 1916 in northern France. Your father had already been promoted to corporal by then. We were dug in for days during the Battle of the Somme. Tens of thousands perished during that battle. The enemy was making a big push, and we were retreating under heavy fire. Two of us, me and Habermaas, who is the tallest one in that picture, got tangled in some barbed wire as we ran back toward another trench. Your father had already made it and was returning fire to give us cover when a mustard gas cloud swept over us. Habermaas and I were goners, trapped in the wire with the mustard cloud blowing into our faces. We had lost our masks during the retreat, and I started gagging as the gas hit the back of my throat. I fell to my knees and tried to hold my breath until the cloud passed. Habermaas got hit in the back with a bullet, and I saw him go down. I couldn’t hold my breath any longer. I took a short breath through my nose and immediately started coughing, and I knew I was a dead man. I fell forward, the skin on my legs ripping on the barbed wire. I still have the scars running down my legs.”
He lifted his right pant leg and revealed a long, rutted scar running up the side of his calf. “Thankfully you can’t see them when I wear stockings,” he quipped.
“So I was just lying there, waiting to die, when your father appeared out of nowhere, wearing a gas mask and carrying two others. He didn’t even have his weapon. He just charged across the battlefield under heavy fire. Somehow he got the masks over our faces, freed us from the wire, and carried us both back to safety. I have no idea how he found the strength, but he did. It was the bravest act I’ve ever witnessed. I owe him my life.
“Habermaas died a few weeks later from an infection. Two of the other boys in that photo died as well. So many friends literally torn apart before our eyes. After the war, your father became a pacifist and refused to accept his Iron Cross. They say that war breeds hawks and doves, and your father became a wonderful dove, as did I. Only I became a dove with much brighter plumage.”
He let go a halfhearted chuckle. Then he turned the page in the album, and there was another photograph of my father holding his gun, looking much harder and world-weary than on the previous page.
“This one was taken just a few days before the end of the war.”
He carefully removed the photograph and held it up to closely examine it.
“We were just children really,” he said. “Here, I want you to have this. But don’t tell your father I gave it to you.”
“I won’t,” I said. And I tucked the photograph into my rucksack along with the cash he had given me.
I stood, thinking that this might be the last time I would be in that apartment, as he walked me to the door.
“So—I will see you next week. Same time,” he said.
�
��But I thought you said—”
“The Countess’s famous balls may return sooner rather than later. You never know. And even if they don’t, I can afford to pay for the printing for quite a while now that I don’t have Fritz to blow my money on. But don’t tell your father. He’s a proud man.”
“Thank you,” I said.
When I arrived back home, I found my father in his office, his head bent low over some papers. He rubbed the side of his forehead as if massaging away a headache, and he looked broken and tired, quite a contrast to the photograph of the tough young soldier I had in my rucksack.
I approached and placed the money I had collected on the desk. He didn’t look up. He examined a balance sheet, and he kept shaking his head, as if the numbers didn’t make sense.
“Papa?”
“Huh?” he grunted, eyes still glued to the papers on the desk.
I wanted to ask about the war and why he had refused the Iron Cross. I wanted to know what it was like to shoot a gun at another man and what it felt like to kill. I wanted to be able to tell him that I was proud of him for saving those men. I was about to speak, but the words got stuck in my throat. In that instant I decided that if he wanted to keep that part of his life a secret, it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to bring it up. So I resolved to keep the photograph to myself. Something about that decision made me feel older, as if it were the most mature thing I had ever done. And the fact that I was now the keeper of my father’s secret made me feel closer to him than I ever had.
“Good night, Papa,” I said.
“Good night, Karl,” he said absently.
I retreated to my room and took out the photo of my father and compared it with the images of my boxing hero, Barney Ross, I had ripped out of The Ring magazine. Whereas before I had perceived my father as the complete opposite of Ross, I now saw similarities in their expressions: hard looks of determination, as if they both were fighting for their lives.
The Brown Bomber
AFTER A LONG TRIP TO AMERICA TO LOBBY FOR A SHOT at a heavyweight title fight against Jimmy “the Cinderella Man” Braddock, Max returned to Berlin, and our lessons resumed as before. Despite the fact that he had trained me for almost two years, he remained an enigmatic figure. More and more, he was being pictured in the press with Hitler, Goebbels, and the other Nazi leaders and described as proof of the supremacy of German blood. Yet this didn’t make sense to me, given how many Jewish friends and associates he seemed to have. Even his manager, the legendary Joe Jacobs, was an American Jew. Because the fight world was centered in the United States, some European fighters had American managers, and many of those managers were Jewish.
The Berlin Boxing Club Page 13