by Cathy Gohlke
It hurt her heart to see that poor man or any of the senior folks mistreated and demeaned only because their customs were different, their language obscure, their values so simple. It was seeing her father’s theories in action—her father’s theories and Hitler’s realities—and that frightened her most of all.
Jason was right from the beginning. It’s as though we didn’t believe Hitler would do what he said he would. Or was the world simply waiting for someone to step up and do it? She groaned inwardly. She’d once considered her father’s rhetoric as innocuous as the morning newspaper. Is my fear, my apathy—indifference—any better than perpetrating evil?
Rachel begged, but Curate Bauer refused to let her help, loath to draw her onto a more dangerous path than the one she already walked.
“Keeping Rivka and Amelie safe, and even yourself and your family, must be your first priority. None of us can save everyone, but we can each do something.”
“But everyone else is doing that for me. Who am I helping?”
“Your grandmother—she needs you. And little Amelie. Prepare her to live in her silent world through sign and self-sufficiency. And Rivka—she has no home, no family, no country.”
Those were not the answers Rachel wanted.
“The point is to live—faithful each day.” Curate Bauer looked as if he were speaking to a child. “And we must prepare and be prepared to go on living. Most of life is not high drama or danger. It is our responsibility to help those around us to live.”
“Be our brother’s keeper—that’s what Friederich says.”
“Or our sister’s.” He smiled. “Sometimes taking up our cross is doing the thing in front of us, not the glamorous, high-risk thing afar off.”
Rachel felt her face warm. She didn’t like being so transparent. It was true that she wanted to do something exciting, something dangerous, something truly rich in self-denial. She wanted . . . and that, she knew, was the problem: it was still about what she wanted.
She nodded at last. “That’s what they say Jesus did, isn’t it?”
Curate Bauer’s brows rose. “You understand, then.”
“He probably didn’t think that giving Himself up to be beaten and spit upon and crucified was very glamorous.”
“For our sins. He did it for us because it was what we needed.”
“What we needed,” Rachel repeated. She’d not thought she needed anything or anyone. But now . . . now she wasn’t sure.
In June, as the Germans marched toward Paris, the last evacuation ship loaded with British and French forces left Dunkirk for England’s shores.
Prime Minister Winston Churchill vowed that even if an invasion of England came, the British empire would “carry on the struggle until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”
Rachel could not understand why the United States—her part of the New World—did not enter the fray, why they didn’t step “forth to the rescue.”
Rachel and Rivka lay awake at night in the attic, listening to their forbidden, hidden radio. The BBC reported heavy British bombing in faraway Frankfurt. Rachel hoped the Institute was leveled to the ground. They wondered how long until British bombers would reach Bavaria. Proximity to Munich made them feel like sitting ducks.
Friederich argued that bombing in the Alps was unlikely, that the mountains made finding and hitting targets difficult. “That’s why the Germans are building factories in the mountain valleys and caves—they believe it’s safer.”
But nothing felt safe, and morale in the village waned, especially when letters from soldier husbands and sons did not come, and no casualty lists were posted.
“Hitler’s forbidden the posting or printing of casualty lists, no matter the victories in the field,” Friederich explained. “He doesn’t want us on the home front comparing our losses with the Great War.”
Oma agreed. “The outcry against the war effort could be his undoing.”
But Rachel knew the uncertainty and fear for their sweethearts, husbands, sons, and brothers were nearly overwhelming to those waiting at home, and she pitied them.
By mid-June Rachel had finished reading Bonhoeffer’s book and portions from Oma’s Bible. The characters and their stories, their strengths and many failings, their desperate needs, were not so different from people she’d known—not so different from herself.
To Rachel, the most startling part was Jesus—not only who He was but how He lived until the very end, and how His life was not meant to throw out the Jewish law He was born under—the law that seemed so harsh and severe at first—but to fulfill it. To live within its protection and within its privileges, and to meet its demands for atonement by offering Himself as a sacrifice for all humankind. All of that ran counter to her upbringing—the very idea that the Bible was anything but destructive to human ambition. Sometimes Rachel was thrilled by what she read; sometimes she felt almost as if she was doing something wrong. It was hard to leave behind the voices of her past.
Rachel and Rivka whispered long into the nights, plowing through questions about the law, about the Passion Play, about the quandary of Bonhoeffer’s radical Jesus, as well as his insistence that the church commit to saving the Jews hunted by Hitler.
Rivka claimed she could make no sense of the disparity between Bonhoeffer’s view and the Aryan clause in the German National Reich Church. “Even some Nazis call themselves Christians, but they expel all the Jews, even the ones who believe in their Jesus—the ones who claim Him as Messiah and Savior. It makes no difference that they have become Christians. They arrest them anyway—just like my brother. You can’t believe what those cross wearers say.”
It made no sense to Rachel, either, but she understood the Nazis’ perverted eugenics reasoning. If one was Jewish, it was a matter of blood—inferior blood—not religion. She’d been fed those “facts” from infancy, and it made her sick.
Some nights they fell asleep talking, disagreeing, exhausted by their questions. What did the apostle Paul mean about Gentiles who believed being grafted as wild branches into the olive tree, and what was that about Jesus being the living vine? Did that mean the vine united all—Jews and Gentiles alike? That would fit with the greater picture, but Rivka wasn’t sure. Rachel wasn’t sure.
While Rivka and Amelie slept, Rachel wept over her parents and their too-small world—a world as sad and narrow-minded as the Third Reich’s philosophies. Father’s arrogance kept him from even imagining that there could be things he didn’t know—possibilities he could not foresee. She pitied him and was surprised at the stirrings of forgiveness within her heart.
But sometimes, especially in dark moments of weariness or anxiety, the old bitterness wriggled through. Memories of his manipulation and betrayal tore at her stomach, her heart. The process of forgiving had to be repeated.
She wondered, if God really existed, how He did it, day by day, year after year, century upon century—why He never gave up, why He bothered with humankind.
She was on her way home late one afternoon in June, pondering just that question, when Maximillion Grieser and his band of Hitler Youth marched past her toward the beer hall. Since Jason had interrupted his inappropriate behavior in the spring, Maximillion had not patrolled the halls of the school.
The boy beside Maximillion jabbed him in the side as their eyes boldly followed Rachel. Maximillion looked away, but his neck, several shades brighter, betrayed his blush. Rachel pitied him. He’d probably spouted off about being smitten with a teacher, and his friends wouldn’t let him forget. Jason had been hard on him, though the youth had certainly deserved it. Neither she nor Lea needed that kind of harassment.
She didn’t realize she’d been staring after them, or that Maximillion had turned to watch her. She couldn’t read his facial expression, but smiled self-consciously at the boy, embarrassed to be caught staring. His face lit, and he waved. She waved in return, smiling, glad to put to rest any animosity o
r shame he might feel. She turned away, idly hoping he’d not misinterpreted her greeting. It was nothing.
It had been quite a day for Maximillion. He’d participated in his first vandalism at the direction of the Gestapo when a local shopkeeper was accused of handing out provisions without the proper ration stamps.
The shopkeeper, beaten and arrested, had begged for mercy along with her daughter. But pity was not the Gestapo’s concern, and it should not be Maximillion’s, according to his Youth leader, who’d helped the boys drown any qualms by taking them on a drinking binge.
The first tankard of beer had helped Maximillion remember that consequences suffered by lawbreakers were their own responsibility and had nothing to do with him. The second tankard helped him forget the woman’s split lip, her bruises, her daughter’s tears and pleas. The third had reminded him why he so enjoyed looking at the beautiful Frau Hartman—and that lifted his spirits and ambitions immensely.
He wondered why he’d ever stopped pursuing her, why he’d paid any attention to the overbearing American correspondent. After all, who was he? Frau Hartman clearly thought well of him, and he of her. But the newspaperman was a nobody, and gone.
The difference between Maximillion’s age and Frau Hartman’s was not so very great. Her husband, though a war veteran, was little more than a cripple. If anything, Maximillion decided he’d wasted valuable time where the beautiful young Frau was concerned.
54
PARIS WAS DECLARED an open city, and within days the Nazis marched in unchallenged. Less than an hour later, Hitler’s ebony spider fluttered from the Eiffel Tower. French prime minister Reynaud, refusing to agree to an armistice with Germany, had barely resigned when General Pétain stepped into the gap. Pétain, desperate to avoid the division of France between Axis powers, humbly requested the armistice. The Vichy Government, puppet to Hitler, was born.
Part of the victorious entourage to Paris, Sturmbannführer Gerhardt Schlick raised plundered champagne flutes to repeated renditions of “Deutschland über Alles” and the “Horst Wessel Song” while the masses in Germany rejoiced, heiling their Führer. Gerhardt applauded Hitler’s order that the armistice be signed in the very railcar in the very forest in which Germany had been made to surrender in 1918.
Delighted to assist in the ripping of the railcar from a French museum, Gerhardt saw it placed once more in the Forest of Compiègne. Returning to the scene of Germany’s defeat increased Hitler’s sweet revenge and the total humiliation of France—a life philosophy Sturmbannführer Gerhardt Schlick embraced with an eye to the future.
Despite the war, Lea was content. Friederich was home and getting stronger each day. He returned to his woodcarving more and more often, as his strength allowed, and she her painting of his carvings. The children’s choir made them both happy, and Amelie completed their joy. If only the war would end, if only the SS would forget them, and it would be safe to bring her into the light of day.
Lea knew these were fantasies, yet she lived them in her heart. Friederich cautioned her against setting her hopes on things unattainable, but Lea only smiled, grateful for the strange fortunes of war.
Even Oma’s nosy neighbors loomed as less of a threat. Despite the Nazis’ determination to create racial purity, numerous prisoners of war from occupied Europe were spread among local homes and camps to live and labor on public works projects. Frau Hillman was preoccupied with Oberammergau’s sudden influx of French visitors—their lilting tongue and rhythmic ways. She could no longer be bothered with the peculiarities of her neighbor, though she frequently commented on Lea’s extraordinary energy.
“You teach children’s choir and acting classes, you help your grandmother, you paint your husband’s carvings, and you work yourself to death in that garden—it’s like you were born with the energy of three women! Though some days you seem all thumbs. Why is that?”
It was two women, to be precise, and two very different sets of thumbs, but Lea simply smiled whenever Gerda Hillman leaned over the fence to gawk. Rachel or Lea—whoever was gardening that day—frequently offered the busybody a bunch of greens or pulled a luscious plum or fig from Oma’s orchard trees to appease her.
Oma was not so easily appeased and still worried over her neighbor, still feared that Sturmbannführer Schlick would see Rachel and Amelie’s photograph, still spent much time on her knees at night.
But Lea sang more than she ever had, and between Friederich’s love and Amelie’s adoration, she glowed. It was impossible not to notice.
55
SUMMER CAME.
Maximillion had grown much taller over the past year. His hair was bleached and his body bronzed from the Alpine sun. His arms had grown thick and his waist trim from climbing ropes and mountains, rowing back and forth across the mountain lake, and chopping wood with his troop of Hitler Youth.
He decided he would wait no longer to pursue his dreams. He combed his hair and buttoned the shirt of his uniform across his broad chest. He fitted his cap to his head, tipping it to a jaunty angle. He’d not take Frau Hartman flowers this time, just himself. He would wait until she was alone, then surprise her, but quickly assure her of his intentions.
Perhaps they would begin with a walk in the woods and a picnic, perhaps a blanket.
Maximillion wasn’t certain what lay ahead. There was the husband to contend with, of course, but Maximillion was not especially worried. The woodcarver was no match for him, and he’d not given his wife children. Frau Hartman was good with the village children—doted on them. She deserved her own.
He’d even talked the question over with a couple of his friends, drinking around a campfire late one night. They’d agreed that the crippled woodcarver was an inconvenience, not one Germany would miss. Survival of the fittest, after all. An accident could be arranged—not so very difficult. They might even be willing to help him. Now that they were all experienced in dealing with “situations” for the Gestapo, they had become creative problem solvers in their own right.
Maximillion waited until the last child left choir practice, until he was certain the Hitler Youth on duty had gone for the day. He grinned in anticipation, straightened his tie, and walked into the darkening school.
Lea had just turned off the overhead light after collecting her students’ worn song sheets. Little fingers, despite their best intentions, had a way of dog-earing corners and smudging print. Or was it dirt ground across the bars and treble clefs? She smiled. It didn’t matter. The children were still precious. She thumped the worn sheets into a straight stack. The last afternoon rays through the small window gave just enough light to find the cupboard.
She heard a slight shuffle at the door but didn’t turn. “So you’re back! Your lunch pail is on the piano, Heinrich. You’ll need that for tomorrow.”
She’d just finished shelving the song sheets in the cupboard when she sensed that someone stood close behind her, someone bigger than Heinrich. Before she could turn he’d covered her eyes from behind and pressed his body against hers. He didn’t speak, but nibbled her neck, just in the curve between its nape and her shoulder—Friederich’s favorite kissing spot, one he hadn’t made good use of since coming back from the war.
Lea giggled, surprised by her husband’s boldness in the school. Her suppleness spurred him on and he nestled deeper, into her hair, his hands seeming to forget her eyes, but traveling down her cheeks, her neck, her arms, encircling her waist.
“Not here!” Laughing, breathless, she tried to turn, only to find herself held tight, smothered with kisses, the hungry kind of kisses Friederich had given her before her last visit to the Institute had crippled her and the war crippled him. She squirmed, turning just a little, not wanting to discourage her husband but wanting him to take her home and finish what he’d begun.
She grasped his arms, but they were not Friederich’s still-too-thin arms. Even in the dim light she could see and feel that the sleeves were not Friederich’s flannel shirtsleeves. Her heart raced; fear gripped he
r brain. She pushed away, turned, and found herself staring into the hungry eyes of Maximillion Grieser.
He pulled her to him, but she beat against his chest with her fists and screamed. “Get away! Take your hands from me!”
He laughed. “What are you doing? You invite me in, then push me away? You know you want me, Lea—as much as I want you.”
“No!”
“Stop pretending. There’s no need. We’re alone.” And he pulled her to his mouth with such force that she could not push him off.
She squirmed and pummeled, but he laughed and kissed her harder, aroused by the hunt and her resistance. His hands groped above her waist. She bit him, and when he grabbed his lip she pushed against his chest and slapped him, hard, across the face.
The lights of the classroom snapped on. Curate Bauer stood in the doorway. The sudden blinding light, the absolute stillness that followed, stole Lea’s breath until she thought she would faint. “He attacked me. He attacked me!”
The horror, the sorrow and misery of understanding, dawned in Curate Bauer’s face. “Get out. Get out, and don’t come back.”
Maximillion checked the blood on his hand, the blood from Lea’s bite, and swiped it away. He looked from the priest to a frightened Lea. “We love each other.”
“We do not!”
“But you teased me—everyone saw. You teased me, and then you get what you ask for but pretend you don’t want it? What is this?”
“You’re crazy, Maximillion! I have a husband—I love my husband! I will tell your mother!” It was the worst thing Lea could think to threaten, the only thing she could imagine that would humiliate Maximillion or make him afraid.
“Tell my mother?” Maximillion looked incredulous, as if scales had been ripped from his eyes, as if he saw Lea for the first time. “You think I am a schoolboy that you will run and tell my mother?”