White Lies

by Rudolph Bader

  However, as the months went by, the political indoctrination, which had crept in on them so surreptitiously at first, gradually became more recognizable. Big new swastika flags were set up in every corner of their school building, and at the front of their classroom, on the wall just above the blackboard, there was a large portrait of the new Reichskanzler, Herrn Adolf Hitler. Every morning, their school day would begin with the singing of the national anthem, all children standing straight behind their desks and raising their right arms stretched out in a stiff salute. When the singing was over, the teacher would ask with a firm and strict voice, “Who is going to save our Fatherland?”

  “It is our Führer, Herr Lehrer!” the children had to shout at the top of their voices. After which ceremony they could sit down, and regular teaching would begin. This routine persisted over the next six years, and before they realised what was going on, the children found themselves at an age where they began to ask some new questions and gradually understood that they had to make some important decisions for life. While they were learning to add and subtract, to multiply and divide, to spell correctly and to understand the intricate rules of German grammar, to know the secrets about plants and the anatomy of the most common domestic animals, things were easy, though some of the ideas about human races that entered the curriculum in biology seemed to Manfred to be the teachers’ particular hobby-horses. When they were learning about geography, naturally it was quite straightforward, where towns, rivers and mountains were on the map, the names of the world’s capital cities and the oceans around the globe, but their teachers began to add political aspects wherever they could. For example, it took Manfred by surprise to learn that certain countries were geologically so deprived and had such a poor climate that it affected their inhabitants over generations so that they became underdeveloped, some even became Untermenschen, inferior human beings. America was particularly affected, and that was why they had so many Jews. When it came to history and Reichskunde, things really amounted to pure political propaganda. The children learned about the rightful claims of the German race, indeed the Aryan race, over vast portions of Europe and beyond.

  In the early years, Manfred and Anna would sometimes discuss these elements of their curriculum, and they both felt sorry that some of their old songs were frowned upon, some music was declared un-German and more and more books were banned by the teachers. As time went by, however, they tended to steer around such discussions, and they gradually learned to avoid any critical remarks about some of the more debatable things that they had to study for school. Besides, their curriculum was so demanding that it left them very little time to speculate over the relative importance or the future relevance of their subjects. They admired Wolfgang’s ease with which he seemed to sail through the subjects. After every test, Wolfgang came off with flying colours.

  For Manfred, the best side of those years was his friendship with Anna. Thomas had long lost interest in her, and Manfred observed that his brother liked to walk home with another girl from his class. Her name was Charlotte. She was taller than Anna and had nice brown hair. Manfred did not really get a chance to get to know her; Thomas seemed to hide her from his younger brother. As the months went by, the two brothers, though still very close in their home and in matters of boys’ activities and interests, drifted apart when it came to girls. They no longer exchanged their impressions about particular girls, and they no longer talked about what they would like to do with a girl once they found themselves alone with one. Such discussions had never had any connection with what Manfred really felt for Anna and what they did when they were alone together. What the brothers had been imagining was childish and sprang from boys’ fantasies anyway. Sometimes Manfred regretted the loss of their former intimacy, and he wondered if it might have something to do with the way things had gone with Anna.

  More and more of the children’s energy became absorbed by sports. Both Weidmann boys loved the challenge of athletics, and while more and more of their school life became regulated by Party rules and political propaganda, their sports activities left them a space of relative freedom. They enjoyed the camaraderie and the spirit of a common interest which they experienced in the sports club. Thomas was fifteen and Manfred was thirteen when they became fully immersed in their sports activities. While Thomas excelled in such disciplines as middle distance running and high jump, Manfred found the 100 meters and long jump more to his liking. And since both boys were growing fast they soon joined the basketball teams of their sports club, too. It was a happy time, and they did not mind the fact that they were only allowed to run or jump in their sports outfit with the swastika on their chests. Such emblems had meanwhile become normal elements of their lives so that hardly anybody took note of them these days.

  When Manfred wasn’t busy for school, engaged in activities of the Hitlerjugend or occupied by his sports activities, he liked to go for walks along the Elster with Anna, although a great deal of her time was also taken up by her activities in the BDM - the so-called Bund deutscher Mädel, the League of German Girls - and her role in the girls’ volleyball team. While her activities as a Jungmädel in the BDM took place in sports halls and in parks where Manfred couldn’t see her, he had the opportunity to admire her from time to time during her volleyball training. Often, he would meet her after her volleyball. Early one Friday evening, he entered the sports complex a bit earlier than usual. The girls were still playing their game of volleyball. Manfred spotted Anna at once. Though he had seen her regularly over the past years and never questioned the fact that he knew what she looked like, she suddenly seemed to look different. At first, he thought it had to be her seriousness and her commitment to the game, but then he realised it was her figure. When she jumped in the air to slap the ball the front of her sports shirt jumped, too. He couldn’t keep his eyes off her newly discovered femininity, the beautiful round shapes of her breasts. Up until now, she had just been his best friend, but this discovery gave him a stab in his stomach, and he realised he had to see her in a new light. She was becoming a woman, a real woman with a woman’s breasts and more rounded buttocks. After his initial shock, he had to admit to himself that this new discovery made him very happy in a way he had never experienced happiness before. He decided to treat her with even more respect than before. She deserved it. She was so beautiful. He would never forget this moment, his first glimpse of Anna as a woman.

  One afternoon that summer, Manfred wanted to meet his old friend Isaac. They had arranged to do some of their maths homework together. When he arrived at Isaac’s house he found the door closed and no one seemed to be at home. One of the neighbours, a stout woman with a ruddy face and an ugly headscarf tied at the back of her head, looked over the fence, broom in hand, and brusquely asked Manfred what he wanted there.

  “Can you help me, please? I’m looking for Isaac. I arranged to meet him. Do you know where he might be?”

  “That whole Jewish lot ran away last night. The cowards sneaked off in the middle of the night. Well, good riddance, if you ask me.” She snorted through her pressed lips and threw him a significant glance charged with self-righteousness.

  Manfred didn’t know what to say. On one hand, he was shocked. Why did they leave so unexpectedly and without saying good-bye? On the other hand, he began to think that perhaps there was some truth in what people were saying about Jews. They just couldn’t be trusted. Everybody was saying it, especially his leaders in the Hitlerjugend, a movement that Manfred had been forced by peer-pressure to join like all his classmates. And then there was Anna, who had told him that Wolfgang had explained to her how the banning of Jews was an international thing, it was the way of the modern world. The English also banned Jews from becoming boy scouts or girl guides. And from his history lessons he knew that the Russians had already persecuted the Jews in the 19th century because they were mean swindlers and criminals and the non-Jewish population had to be protected from them. So, the Jews must be a
very treacherous race, after all. He must have been deceived by his former friend Isaac. Manfred knew that he was not in agreement with his father’s views in this matter. In fact, both boys thought their father was a blind romantic. Whenever it was reported that yet another Jewish family had disappeared from Gera, he said he was very sorry. One day, shortly after their mother had been sent to a health spa in Czechoslovakia, they had a fierce argument. It began with their father’s report about the disappearance of a Jewish family that he used to know very well.

  “What a pity the Levis from Weimarer Strasse have left. They were such nice people and good customers. You know, boys, I used to play cards with Chaim Levi, and he–”

  “–Filthy people!” Thomas interrupted his father, “We’re better off without them.”

  “How can you speak about the Levis like that?”

  “They were thieves and swindlers. Everybody knows that. We were just taken in by them. They were never really part of our town. They never really belonged. They can’t have made their money in any rightful way. You can’t believe that.”

  “And Wolfgang told me,” Manfred joined in, “that they were lucky they weren’t arrested for worse crimes. Very cowardly of course, to sneak off like that in the middle of the night.”

  “Yes,” Thomas added, “they say they were really American spies.”

  “Nonsense!” their father shouted. “I knew them very well, and I can tell you they were perfectly honest.”

  “And I can tell you,” Thomas snarled back, “you’d better not say such things when other people can hear.”

  “What next!” His rage mounted, as he could sense his authority melting away in front of his sons. “I can say what I like in my own house.”

  While their father grew angrier and angrier by the minute, his sons remained relatively calm. They knew they were on the winning side. The whole country was behind them. Their father’s romantic views belonged to the past. And as the sons knew very well, these days, such blindness was even becoming dangerous.

  Thomas said to his brother, “Come, let’s go. We don’t want to be associated with such seditious babble.” Of course, he wanted Father to hear this. The provocation was fully intentional.

  The boys didn’t know that their disrespectful behaviour towards their own father was the result of two strong factors, puberty and political indoctrination. These two forces united in their minds and set them more apart from their father as the months and years went by. While their father could cope with the rebelliousness of his sons’ puberty, he found it an almost impossible task to save them from what he considered the dangerous and inhuman influence of their teachers, their sports coaches, their peer groups and the general hysterics in public life. He hadn’t even been able to make them see the terrible danger of the new legislation on racial segregation that the Führer had announced at Nuremberg recently.

  They left their father sitting at the dinner table. Only three years earlier, such rebellious behaviour would have amounted to an act of high treason within their family, deserving the harshest punishment. But these days, Father’s pompous ways were getting him nowhere, and with Mother’s absence, the mitigating factor had also disappeared. Manfred could see that his father’s face was swollen with anger and disappointment. But this wasn’t the time for sentimentality. If they, as members of the Hitlerjugend, were going to be the builders of the new Germany, they had to place public well-being above petty little family disputes. They didn’t want to be left out of things on the dawn of the new Germany. They wanted to be part of it. Surely, this was a truly noble aim. As the Führer had said in his recent radio broadcast, this was the beginning of a new era, the future would be a future without Untermenschen, and the German Empire would last for a thousand years once it had got rid of all the undesirable elements.

  Two

  It was a grey Thursday afternoon when Manfred came home from school earlier than on other Thursdays because their history teacher was absent, attending some further training course on new research findings about the origins of the German people. The headmaster said the school was understaffed since they had lost two of their teachers recently, the maths teacher Dr Feigenbaum and the physics teacher Herrn Kahn, who had both disappeared unexpectedly, which had caused the headmaster not only to drop a number of maths and physics lessons but also to refuse to ask other teachers to replace any of their absent colleagues. This was his personal protest aimed at the education department of Thuringia, who should have sent more teachers to replace those who had left. After all, the headmaster had lost seven teachers in the course of the past eighteen months, and all without pre-warning. His protest led to an increase in free lessons for the pupils.

  Manfred closed the garden gate and stepped up to the front entrance. He had hardly closed the front door and reached the hall when the telephone rang. This was still an unusual occurrence since it had been only about three months ago when they’d got their telephone. There weren’t many of his classmates whose parents had a telephone, but several houses on the Galgenberg had them. At that time, the telephone was primarily considered to be a communication tool for business purposes. Who needed such a contraption for private conversation? That was considered an absurd luxury by the general public. Naturally, Father had one in his delicatessen shop in the Sorge, so whoever wanted to reach him could call him there. And it was only two years ago when the telephone network in Gera was upgraded to a self-dialling system. Before that time, you had to call the operator to get a connection. Father told the boys that Germany was at the head of technical development in Europe. Three decades later in England, Manfred would remember this when you still had to get through the operator in Britain. But now, in the mid-thirties, he still felt very nervous when he had to answer the telephone. After all, it was a pretty strange thing to be talking to someone you couldn’t see face to face. So, it was with mixed feelings that he picked up the receiver from the hook on the new contraption hanging on the wall, opposite the clothes-rack in the hall.

  “Hello, this is Manfred Weidmann speaking.”

  “Oh, good afternoon. This is Dr Wolfsohn calling from the St Wenzel Sanatorium in Karlsbad. Can I speak to your father, please?”

  “I’m sorry. My father is not here. But I think you can reach him in his shop.” Manfred read the telephone number of his father’s shop from a notepad by the telephone and wondered why the doctor from the sanatorium wanted to talk to Father. It must have something to do with Mother; perhaps they wanted to change her treatment. He was worried. Could it be a more serious situation? He was never told what Mother’s illness was, and neither was Thomas, or he would have told him. Two months ago, they had driven to Karlsbad in their new car to visit their mother at the sanatorium. Their new car, yet another emblem of middle-class affluence becoming quite common on the Galgenberg, was a dark blue Adler saloon-car with a sliding sunroof. Father had insisted it was a German car of the highest quality. Manfred liked the musty smell of its leather seats and the comforting purr of its engine.

  After he’d rung off, he sat down at the kitchen table to do his homework. He opened his English book and began to memorise the list of three dozen irregular verbs that they had to learn for the test on Friday. Some were dead easy, others were quite tricky. Easy ones were verbs like “put, put, put”, “hit, hit, hit” or “cut, cut, cut” where all three forms were identical. Difficult were verbs like “come, came, come”, “hold, held, held” and others where you were never quite sure which of the three forms was different from the others, the present, the past tense or the past participle. And the really tricky ones were verbs like “lie, lay, lain” and “lay, laid, laid”, even the regular verb “lie, lied, lied” because it was so like an irregular one, those were verbs you could mix up so easily. Manfred was sure the teacher would try to trick them on these on Friday. Herr Frank was an unpredictable teacher, some of Manfred’s friends said that was because he had been abro
ad for too long. Everybody knew he had spent at least a whole year in Great Britain, and of course it was general knowledge that he must have got under the influence of lots of Jews and Gypsies over there. So, he could probably not be trusted one hundred percent. All the boys expected some foul-play from Herrn Frank, even though they had no concrete reasons for that. There were moments when Manfred found himself liking Herrn Frank - who, one had to admit, sometimes gave them proof of a very pleasant sense of humour - but it was only a fleeting whim that he immediately dismissed from his mind because he felt he had to go along with the other boys, who had to be right. Herr Frank was bound to have been infected by Jewish tricks during his time in such an untrustworthy society. Their history teacher had given them some examples of how the Jews dominated public life in Britain, particularly the British banking system, which in turn dominated the world of business all over the world. That was one of the things that the new Germany saw as its duty to rectify.

  His thoughts drifted off, away from English grammar and irregular verbs. He remembered their last visit to Karlsbad in the Adler. Mother had been sitting in a wicker-chair under a group of very old trees in the large park at the back of the main building of the Sanatorium. There was a Scottish tartan rug in red and green spread across her legs, even though the weather seemed quite warm to Manfred.

  “I’m so happy to see my dear boys,” she said, when Manfred stepped up to her. She gave both boys an extremely long and tight embrace. And Manfred could detect a tear running down her left cheek. He wondered what could have made her so sentimental. It wasn’t her usual way.

  Manfred liked his mother’s aura, her smell, the touch of her cheek when she kissed him, and he felt safe in her embrace. He was sad that her embraces had become a lot rarer over the past year or so. Also, they had become physically altered, somehow, he wasn’t quite sure why. Could it be that she looked thinner and her bones stuck out more clearly? Did her tears have anything to do with her emaciated appearance and her pale blue complexion? While she was talking to Father, Manfred observed her body language and her general appearance, and it struck him that he didn’t really know his own mother. Was this pale, thin, fragile wisp of a woman really his mother? Was this the jolly, well-proportioned and well-balanced woman he had known in his early childhood? Where was her charming smile and her full face? Where had her air of self-confidence gone? Looking at her now, Manfred felt sorry for her and mysteriously estranged from her. He had to fight off a cold shiver down his spine, and all of a sudden, the day had lost some of its generally agreeable and comforting atmosphere. Thinking back to this moment in years to come, he became convinced that that afternoon in the park at Karlsbad had really marked the end of his childhood. It was the moment when he realised that he wouldn’t have his mother forever. It was his first taste of human mortality, although he couldn’t have expressed it as such at the time.