Kindergarten

by Peter Rushforth

  She stood up, opened the door of a cupboard against the wall, near the fir-tree, and took out a large framed photograph. She held up the photograph and examined it closely as she spoke.

  “This photograph must be at the centre of the exhibition in Berlin. It contains the source of all my paintings.”

  She began to talk to them, quietly and simply, of all that she and Grandpa Michael had kept between themselves, the events that had destroyed her world.

  She had come from a wealthy and cultured Dresden family. Her grandfather Jakob Mitscherlich had owned the biggest toy shop in the city, in Prager Strasse, the main shopping street. Her father, a university professor specialising in German Literature, had been wounded, and decorated, in the First World War, and her mother had been a fashionable children’s doctor. It was a large and loving household—she had two sisters and three brothers—surrounded by children, nieces and nephews, cousins, aunts and uncles, grandparents. In the early 1920s, a young woman, she had gone to Berlin, and achieved her great successes with her paintings, until the rise of the Nazis had made her and her family Untermenschen, subhumans, and therefore disgusting. All the apparatus had swung into action against the millions of people who had no right to be treated as human beings, intensifying as the years went by. Those friends who were able began to leave the country, but her parents had decided to stay. Germany was their home. Most of her family, those who wished to leave, were trapped, unable to abandon children, or possessions, or sick or elderly relatives, or unable to get them out of the country. Her family persuaded her that she ought to leave when the opportunity arose after the events of Kristallnacht, when synagogues and houses burned, and the broken glass from Jewish homes and shops littered the streets throughout Germany. She had gone to England to work as a domestic servant—she knew no one in England, and her work had not been published there. She carried her paintings and sketch-books, and her parents’ wedding-rings hidden inside a wooden toy, a little doll’s cradle, that had been in her grandfather’s shop before it was taken away from him. Germany was famous for its beautiful children’s toys. She never saw any of her family again. They were lost in the immense, crowded darkness.

  When she finished talking, quietly, without bitterness, she handed the photograph to them.

  “This is my family,” she said, “the family I had forty years ago.”

  There was no one he could recognise in the photograph as being Lilli, so she must have held the camera. They were all looking towards her.

  Lilli began to identify who the people were.

  The room in which they sat was the same as the one in the painting of the christening scene in “Godfather Death.” The same pattern to the plate, the same candlesticks, the same design on the silver, every painstaking detail of the painting. The scene was a long polished table illuminated by candle-light, just before a meal. The family—Lilli’s parents and grandparents, her sisters and brothers, their sons and daughters, aunts, uncles, cousins, from the very elderly to a small baby—sat around the beautifully laid and decorated table, formal, consciously posed, everyone very still and serious, gazing into the camera. It was like a small ceremony for a leave-taking or a scene of private mourning, its emotions gentle and low-key.

  The second sister from the painting for “Fitcher’s Bird” sat half-way down the right-hand side of the table in a simple white dress, her arm around a boy of about five standing beside her, very upright in a dark suit, with a small girl, fair-haired, sitting on her knee. It was Lilli’s youngest sister, Edda, and her two children, Florian and Dorothea, the Hansel and Gretel from the painting in his bedroom.

  Lilli’s sister was several years older in the photograph than in the painting, but completely recognisable. All around the table were the faces from the paintings: the Goose Girl, Rapunzel, the Girl Without Hands, the Fisherman and His Wife, Cinderella, the brother and sister from “The Juniper Tree,” the Poor Boy in the Grave, Snow White.

  Lilli’s family peopled her paintings; their houses, rooms, and gardens were the settings. All around the dining-room were Lilli’s memories of her family. There were twenty-seven people in the photograph.

  He looked at the interiors of the pictures around him, and thought of those in the empty room next door, rooms in which families sat quietly together, the doors closed against the outside world, a world which would force open those doors and destroy all that it found inside after it had taken what it wanted, the silly family jokes of ordinary people, the school-books lying on the table, the unfinished knitting beside the chair, the photographs and pictures on the walls, the letters hidden away in drawers—all the noise and fury of the world reduced to the grief of individuals, families reaching out their arms trying to hold on to each other: Peter and Aline Goetzel and their daughter Lotte with her school photograph under glass and her notepaper with the elaborate letter “C” for Charlotte; the parents of Hanno and Hedwig Gr)nbaum, Ruth and Bernhard; Rudolf Seidemann’s family; Ernst and Madeleine Jacoby, who had hoped their plan of emigrating to America would work, and their three children, Eugenie, Julius, and Lisette; Walter Werth’s mother, Clara, and his twin sisters, Emmy and Doro, who sent him drawings of scenes from home so he wouldn’t be homesick; Stefanie Peters’s parents, and her little brother, who had just learned how to walk; Leonie Matthias; Nickolaus Mittler, his big brother, and his parents; Kurt and Thomas Viehmann’s parents, Katherina and Wilhelm, and the rest of their family; the scores of others, all the family of his grandmother, all the people in all those pictures, the tiny few of the hundreds and thousands of families, all those millions of people, every one a person with memories and individuality, in every one of whom the world existed, like all the people in the book that Jo had been reading in the bath, the visitor’s book from the living-room at Tennyson’s that Mum had started years ago, with the dark green cover and Unsere Gäste embossed on it in gold.

  Aidan, Eleanor, Lincoln, and Michael came to stay. House in chaos, but cuisine of usual high standard. Jo not quite walking yet.

  Lovely gossipy evening. Music, singing, and talk. Michael and Lilli.

  Safety note: don’t sneeze in the sun lounge. Michael.

  Champagne to celebrate Pieter and Margaret’s fourteenth wedding-anniversary. Questionable vintage, but a very jolly body, but enough of Margaret. The champagne was splendid, too. Margaret, I love you! For God’s sake push Pieter under a bus! Chris.

  They’ve papered the walls at last. Max.

  Now we are five. Welcome to our house, Matthias, from Pieter, Margaret, Corrie, and Jo.

  Dropped in for coffee—stayed for tea! Sal.

  Lilli’s with us now.

  Cadged another tea. Sal.

  An evening of Bach from the Musical Meeuwissens. Margaret’s pregnant AGAIN! Look out the London Philharmonic! Sal and Lilli.

  Jo spoke first.

  “Did Sal tell you that story about those hostages in Greece during the war?” he asked.

  Corrie shook his head.

  “A few years ago, she and Chris were on holiday in Greece. In the northern part. Before the divorce.”

  He looked up from under his neatly combed fringe at Corrie and Lilli, seeing that he had their attention. His eyes didn’t leave theirs as he spoke, moving from one to the other, like a small child trying to gauge the feelings and moods of adults by the expressions on their faces, trying to see how he ought to behave.

  “It was somewhere very remote, and a lot of guerrillas were there during the war. Because the Germans hadn’t occupied it. One day the guerrillas made an attack. They had done it before, but this time they killed a lot of German soldiers. An ammunition dump or something. The local German commander was so angry that he…”

  He paused, thought hard, then altered his sentence slightly, as though speaking the words of a fairy-tale to a child, where the words must always be the same, time after time, as the story is told at bedtime.

  “The German commander was furious, and took all his troops to the nearest village. He ma
de all the villagers gather together, and told them what had happened. He said that there was going to be a reprisal. He was sorry. But it was wartime. One male member of each household was going to be executed on the following morning.”

  Jo cast around for the right words to follow, chewing at his bottom lip, concentrating fiercely.

  “The next part is the strange part. He told everyone to go home. They were to decide amongst themselves who was going to be the one to die in their household. Each family had to decide for itself.”

  There was a pause when he had finished speaking.

  “What happened?” Corrie asked, at last.

  “The following morning, the chosen hostages were all killed. Just as he had said.”

  Corrie thought about the quiet talking into the early hours of the morning, deciding who was to be chosen to die. Who had they chosen? Newly born babies who had only been alive for a few days; weak old men, towards the end of their lives? He imagined them, walking, or being carried, towards their deaths, followed by their grieving families.

  Whoever had a child, whoever had a mother or a father, whoever had a friend, whoever was capable of feeling love, of forming a tie, of wishing to protect or care for another person, had a weakness that could be exploited, had a hostage in his life, someone he would give all he had in the world to protect from harm.

  “On Christmas Eve,” Jo said, “when you were reading ‘The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids’ to Matty, Corrie and I were sitting on the stairs listening.”

  Jo looked at Lilli, his face stern.

  “The bit I always remember best in that story is the bit when the wolf goes to the miller and tells him to throw flour over his paws to disguise them.” He began to quote from the story: “‘The miller thought to himself, “The wolf is going to harm someone,” and refused to do as he was told. Then the wolf said, “If you do not do as I tell you, I will kill you.” The miller was afraid, and did as he was told, and threw the flour over the wolf’s paws until they were white. This is what mankind is like.”’

  He repeated the final sentence.

  “‘This is what mankind is like.’”

  Lilli thought about what jo had said. As she spoke, her German accent, as sometimes happened when she had a lot to say, became more and more pronounced.

  “I suppose I should say something wise, something forgiving and fine to teach you all the goodness in mankind, but I have never been one of those people who believe that those who have suffered experience wisdom as an inevitable result of their suffering, become wiser and richer people. ‘Suffering’ sounds a grand word, as if I were someone special, someone who deserved a special hearing when opinions are expressed, but it is the word which truly expresses the feelings I had. I could never submit humbly in the face of the ‘inscrutable will’ of a God who had a purpose for a chosen people, a purpose in which all things that happened played a part. I raged when I was eleven and my oldest brother’s baby died of a simple childhood illness. I raged when I was sixteen and my old aunt went blind. Why should a baby die? Why should an old woman go blind?

  “We were never a religious family. My mother and father were very modern in their outlook, freethinkers. We were like a Christian family who are Christian only in remembering a little special celebration at Easter or Christmas, but for whom the idea of Christianity plays no conscious part in everyday life. I think it might have helped if we had been religious: we would have known that we had something we felt we were ennobled by suffering for. I could, perhaps, have rejoiced at such a death, going to see the unknown face of my certain God. But the faces I wanted to see were not unknown faces: they were the faces I already knew the best in all the world. We felt like people who were persecuted for being Christians, when we knew nothing of what being a Christian meant, and all because a distant relation, of whom we knew nothing, lit a candle in a church once, a long time ago. We were Germans, ordinary people, and then they told us that we weren’t Germans, we were Jews. It would be like being told that you were no longer regarded as being English because you were a Christian, as if the one cancelled out the other.

  “I shall never forget the grief and anger of what I saw and heard in those years in Berlin before I left, and I can never forget what happened to all those I loved. It would be a betrayal to forget. All my love was with them, and I felt that my love died when they died. No one had the right to expect me to be wise and noble and understanding when they died, and died in such a way. I wanted to kill the whole world. If I had believed there could be a God who had allowed all that to happen to serve His purpose, a cleansing fire from which the world would emerge clean and ennobled as if by a flood, I would have hunted God down and destroyed Him. ‘This is what mankind is like.’ Yes, I thought all mankind was worthy of contempt for what had happened, and the cleansing flood has brought filth and fear into every person’s life.

  “It is a Jewish custom, I think—this is something I have read, not something I have done or experienced; Jewishness is not something I know a great deal about—to leave a pebble at the graveside when you have visited the grave of someone you have loved, someone you love still, to show that you have been there and remembered him.”

  Lilli thought for a moment.

  “My family, I believe, died in Auschwitz, after being in Theresienstadt, some of them, and I know no graves where I could lay a pebble, but I think of the Polish memorial for the dead on the site of Treblinka. I have seen a photograph in a book: the little area where one million people were put to death. Flat fields surrounded by evergreen trees are there, and thousands of pebbles, stones, and rocks sweep through the fields in broad paths. Each pebble is not a person. Each pebble is a village, each stone a town, each rock a city, and their sizes show the numbers brought there to that place to be killed, from the villages, towns, and cities of Europe—all those men, women, and children, rich and poor, all those different languages converging on a tiny remote place in Poland. In the centre of the fields amidst the stones and pebbles is a rock like a mountain: the stone for the people brought there from Warsaw to be killed, one third of all the people in that city. I think of all those empty houses, all those deserted streets.

  “I felt that the wolf was knocking at the door, and I had no stones to sew inside him. I wanted him to come through the door and destroy me also. I felt that I could never find any stones: there is only sand in a desert. But, in time, I did find pebbles to lay beside their graves, and tiny pebbles mount up until they outweigh any boulders you can find at the edge of a mountain. Instead of turning my heart to stone, the pebbles sank all my bitterness, and I remembered the good things with happiness.”

  She turned to Corrie.

  “Look again at the photograph. Do you notice anything about it?”

  He answered at once, without even glancing at the photograph.

  “It’s the same room as in ‘Godfather Death.’”

  “Yes, but there’s more than that. Look at the plate in the centre, near the front. Look at the knives and forks. Think of your birthday cake.”

  He looked at the plate in the photograph, and then went back to the table, carrying the photograph with him, and sat down.

  It was the same plate as the plate on which his birthday cake stood, the plate that had been used for the Hansel and Gretel gingerbread house on Christmas Eve. The knives and forks they had used on Christmas Eve were the knives and forks in the photograph, with the letter “D” engraved on them in elaborate script.

  “As things got worse for my family in Germany, they arranged to hide some of their possessions with friends who lived in the same street, a Christian family. Each night the neighbours came over with their baby granddaughter in her pram, and smuggled things back into their house in the pram, and hid them in one of their cellars. At the end of the war, a letter reached me from Germany, the first letter I had seen with a German stamp since the last letter I received from my mother. It was from the daughter of the woman with the pram, telling me she had possessions which w
ere mine, kept safely for me. She and her husband and daughter came over to England to stay with Michael and me, and brought them with her. She told me that her mother had died in a concentration camp. She had spoken out against what was happening. She, with other Christians, had tried to help, tried to resist what was going on around them. ‘This is what mankind is like,’ Jo. There was a pebble there. I have the plates and the silver, and some of my mother’s jewellery, and I know of people who tried to stop what was happening in their street. They belonged to no organisation. They were just our neighbours saying that something was wrong and should not happen, and some of them died for believing this. God would spare a city for one righteous man, but there were many little candle flames in all that darkness.”

  She picked up a book lying on the table beside her chair. It was Children’s Voices, the new English edition of Kinderstimmen.

  “One of the poems in this book, the very first one I illustrated, is by a Jewish woman poet from Berlin. She taught deaf-and-dumb children. She was taken to Theresienstadt at about the same time as my family, and then to one of the camps, and killed. I don’t know—no one knows—when exactly she was killed, or where. She was taken to the concentration camp because she refused to leave her father when he was taken away. He was eighty years old. Her love for her father overcame everything else. ‘This is what mankind is like.’ There was another pebble there.”

  She turned the pages in the book, until she was looking at the final poem.

  “‘Will you sing ‘Auf meines Kindes Tod’ again for me, Jo, just as you did on Christmas Eve? The tune is so beautiful.”

  Jo looked at Corrie.

  “My cello’s in the Ferry House.”

  “I’ll sing it unaccompanied, then.”

  He stood up, and sang, his voice very true and piercing, the words that Corrie had set to music for “Hansel and Gretel.”

  “Von fern die Uhren schlagen,

  Es ist schon Liefa Nacht…”

  “Do you know what the title of the poem means, Jo?” Lilli asked when he had finished.