Her aunt was still asleep when they finally got to the villa, and in fact she never really woke up. Which was a mercy, since a few days later, when the rampage had subsided and the girl crept back to the apartment, she found the place destroyed. Not so much robbed as wrecked, like what she’d seen in the streets. The crystal and china smashed, the piano hacked to pieces, dirty oil poured over the lovely old rugs. Paintings slashed, even her aunt’s Nolde, which was ironic, since wasn’t he a Nazi himself? Her own books had been pulled off the shelves and seemed to have been kicked around a bit, but not burned. Maybe they’d run out of petrol.
It had come to her then, she said, looking around that room in the aftermath, that this chaos, this insane destruction, was a perfect portrait of postwar Germany. The chaos in people’s lives, the unemployment, the insane inflation, wheelbarrows full of their own good marks worth nothing, and the crippled veterans, home from a war they hadn’t realized they’d lost, with their lives in ruins. They had struggled with it for ten years, the German people, each in their own private abstract desperation, but then Hitler had flung open their doors and taken them out of their dark rooms, into the streets, with someone real to chase down, to hate, to blame. Someone whose windows they could take the great pleasure of shattering with impunity now.
She got to her feet—anyway, she was through with all that, with trying to make sense, to understand. She was on her way to Romania, where she heard you could still get out. She had a cousin in America, but that was hopeless; there was said to be a line three-deep surrounding the US consulate in Bucharest, and people who managed to get inside the palings were sleeping on the steps.
But the British Consulate was still giving a few visas, and she had a sister in England, and could speak the language. She was hoping to find work as a governess there.
“And then perhaps study?” asked Hermann.
She laughed—a sort of cackle.
How old are you? he asked her.
Twenty, she said. “Old.”
AFTER THAT, HERMANN STOPPED talking about “the twentieth century.” Still, they had grown up on German culture, Goethe and Schiller, Kant and Hegel, Mozart and Beethoven, and couldn’t comprehend what was going on in their land. What was the madness? Where had it come from? There were only about 600,000 “undesirables” in Germany all told, in a population of 65 million. To be obsessed like that, even if it was hard, even if they’d lost the war—the girl was right, they’d gone mad.
“Maybe it’s the bread,” his wife suggested. Bad rye was known to make people see things. And they’d always gone a bit mad with their Walpurgis Night, when the ancient demons rode down from the mountains—but didn’t people light bonfires then to keep them away? A sort of protection?
But these bonfires had been part of the general madness, which meant what? Who knew? The only thing now, though, would be for someone to step in and stop them. Restore the rule of reason. Hermann still had faith in America. They heard that Roosevelt recalled his ambassador from Germany after Kristallnacht. This he took as a good sign.
Anyway, the year was turning. People would surely come to their senses soon. It was 1939—“A better year!” They clinked their glasses and drank the last of their plum brandy, the last for them anyway.
Because in March of that year, Hitler marched east from the Sudetenland and took the rest of their country.
“AND RIGHT AWAY, you could feel the Hitler atmosphere,” said Magda. It started with the posters on the walls, warning the populace of subversive elements in their midst. You would know them henceforward by the yellow stars they would be required to wear on their clothing. What that star meant was that those persons were no longer Czechs, or Hungarians or Poles or whatever else they might have been or thought they were before. Now they were foreigners, a different race in fact, even if they had blond hair and blue eyes.
As for the “subversives” themselves, they were to report to the police station for their stars, and Hermann complied. For one thing, it would have been beneath his dignity as a leading citizen to flout the law. For another, there was the strong belief, general among the law-abiding populace, that compliance would afford them protection.
So in 1939, Hermann and his wife and daughters sewed on their stars. Their town had a prewar population of ten thousand, of whom seven hundred and fifty were now required to walk around with yellow stars on their coats. Just a piece of cloth, they told each other, a small thing, but now when they walked into a shop, silence fell. People stared or looked away, people they knew. Friends and neighbors crossed to the other side of the street.
Why, though, was the question. What had they done? Had some strange planet risen in the sky? Someone they knew went to a nearby town to consult an astrologer, but nothing clear seemed to be written. A psychic had visions of fire and drowned herself in a pond.
But she had been half-mad anyway, Hermann assured his wife and daughters, and anyway, this couldn’t go on much longer. Not with England poised for action, and America in the wings.
STILL, “THIS,” AS HERMANN CALLED IT, was steadily closing in around them. “And the truth was, it all happened so fast,” said Magda. First one right revoked, not so bad in itself, but then another, still leaving room, though, for some hope, some belief in an ultimate rationality, offstage perhaps, but somehow there, somewhere.
But every week brought more scrawls on the walls, ugly faces, caricatures—big noses, bags of money—and posters calling them names—VERMIN! PIGS!—and further restrictions. People with stars were no longer allowed out at night, or into shops, even groceries, except during certain inconvenient hours. Nor were they permitted in public places—first the restaurants, then the movies, then the parks.
NOW THE PARKS ARE JUST FOR US! proclaimed the posters.
“It was ridiculous,” said Magda. A childish game, “them” and “us,” which even as a small girl she’d grown out of. But people she knew and liked—used to like—were starting to walk around with swastikas on their arms, “proud as peacocks,” she said. Her father scoffed, but still it was painful.
And is the park so much more fun now, without us? she wanted to ask them. Or the schools? Because that’s what came next, and once the thrill of expelling a hundred children had passed, what were they left with? A hundred empty desks, along with a few faces gone from the staff room? But someone must have missed those faces, maybe even most people missed them. She agreed with her father—it was all too infantile, too stupid, to last. People would come to their senses.
Though it was taking longer than they’d expected, and next came the order to turn in their bicycles, which is when she started feeling less scorn than fear. Not that anyone was imagining a wild bike ride over the border at night, but the thought that someone wanted their movement restricted yet further was unsettling. Still, the bicycles were duly turned in.
But then came the demand for the radios. And this was when Hermann stopped and considered. The girls loved their radio, it was their only music these days; and more important, their connection to the world beyond, the real world, as they called it. They couldn’t, of course, ride their bicycles to London, but they could tune their radio into the BBC and hear the voice of reason, even if they couldn’t quite catch or understand all that it said.
“Should we comply?” the people of the town stopped and asked each other. Should they continue, as the staunch citizens they’d always been, to do as the law commanded, or draw the line here and reconstitute themselves as outlaws?
For this, surely, was the way they were being treated, the young men among them were starting to argue.
But it’s a big step from law-abiding, upstanding businessman to even passive resistance, a step that Hermann, as a pillar of the community, a payer of taxes and supporter of the arts and the poor, found he couldn’t bring himself to take. There was still the belief that if they complied with the law, no matter how harsh, how outlandish, if they complied to the letter, sewed on the ridiculous stars, turned in their bicycles,
if they did everything right, then they were still somehow inside. Still entitled to the law’s protection.
But to keep their radio, hidden in a back room, under the bed, only to be played very softly after dark, the BBC and the station from Vienna that still played Mozart every evening—“Who would that hurt?” his daughters were begging.
“Me,” Hermann concluded. He had always obeyed the law. He was a Czech, a good citizen. Hitler wouldn’t take that from him, he said. He’d turn in the radio, and once the English and Americans stopped this thing, he’d buy a new one, a better one. Even if the whole German nation was eating bad rye bread, this was still the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages. This kind of madness could not be allowed to go much further, Hermann still believed.
5
BUT HE WAS WRONG, because right after that, they were forced from their house.
“No longer permitted to live on principal streets,” was how the edict put it. They were given a few days to be gone.
And what had happened to the Czech constitution? Hermann asked the officials who came to inform him—local police, not even Nazis.
But they didn’t answer because, for them, the loss or not of their constitution wasn’t much of an issue. Nor did it seem to matter that their duly elected president Edvard Beneš was in exile, or that the country had been dismembered into a pathetic group of “protectorates.” What mattered were the good-looking new gray and black uniforms they’d been given, and the furnished houses that would soon be available to them free of charge, or so they’d been told.
“We had no time to pack more than a few necessities,” said Magda, some pots and pans, a few mattresses, a suitcase or two. They found a small apartment nearby, on one of the back streets, “and when it’s over, we’ll be back,” Hermann swore to his daughters, and despite orders to the contrary, locked the door. He pinned his own war medals on his coat, beneath the yellow star, and then they were escorted away “like criminals,” Magda said.
A man Hermann knew took over their house, lock, stock, and barrel—their silver still on the sideboard, the carpets still on their floors. “They came before we left, and stood there watching, like vultures, with swastika armbands and pins on their coats.” One hundred and fifty houses in their small town changed hands that way in one weekend. The neighbors watched from their windows, but no one came out to say good-bye.
“People who were so close to us, people who’d lived next door for thirty years, suddenly just stopped talking to us. The whole world turned upside down.”
Although she didn’t really blame them. The posters plastered to the walls warned of the consequences in big red letters: ANYONE SEEN HELPING THEM WILL BE TREATED LIKE THEM. A clergyman who’d sewn a yellow cross on his robe was taken in and beaten. People heard the screams on the street outside.
“They too were petrified for their lives,” said Magda. Not that it wasn’t painful when old friends crossed the road so as not to have to risk a smile; but on the other hand, no one could deny the opportunities that the situation afforded.
Because after people’s houses came their businesses, which were also now available, virtually free of charge, to former managers, partners, even junior salesmen, trained and trusted by the displaced owners. In Hermann’s case, his farms went to his manager, an ethnic German named Goodmann. He wouldn’t forget Hermann’s kindnesses over the years, Goodmann called as he drove back out to the farm, on Hermann’s sleigh, pulled by Hermann’s horses. Goodmann’s now.
As for the grain business, a young man Hermann had hired was now the owner. He was a nice fellow, which was why Hermann had hired him, given him his big chance in life, and he actually asked Hermann’s forgiveness, even paid him something under the table, and “hired” him back, to keep running the business, though at a subminimum wage. It was all he dared pay, the young man said.
ANYONE SEEN HELPING THEM WILL BE TREATED LIKE THEM—Hermann told his wife he thought the man had been decent enough, considering.
Though considering what? He had thought this—this nightmare would be contained, would be one of those things that happen, history, a coup d’état, a change of government, even of borders, something you struggle against but then move on from, and go about your life, with a reconfigured sense of friend and foe, perhaps.
But it had already gone on much longer than anyone could possibly have expected, and who knew anymore what the so-called civilized world would do about it, if anything? Hermann was trying to make sense of it, even as it shifted under his feet, trying to find a way to protect his wife, his family. He wasn’t worried particularly about being poor. He was smart, and lucky in business, he knew that. He would always find a way.
If they let him—when they let him. But when would that be? Each day seemed to bring another law, another street he couldn’t cross or store he couldn’t enter. Next it would be the very air they breathed, he laughed—tried to laugh.
But there was something here that confused him, seemed to go beyond the garden-variety hate he’d thought belonged to the past. He’d thought, growing up, that they’d left that behind, along with the dark clothes, the beards, the closed world of their grandfathers. They’d been born into the light of a new century, and they’d embraced it; they had friends of all religions, all walks of life, they sang carols at Christmas. He’d risked his life in the last war.
“Their war!” some people had called it, but he had begged to differ. It was his war too, and he would fight for his country, die for it if he had to; but what would he be dying for now, if it pleased one of these thugs in uniform to shoot him in the street in front of his family, as they’d done to one of his friends the week before?
Had he been fooling himself all along? he wondered. And what about those so-called friends—had it always been there, behind the cheer, behind the smiles? He had loved them, stood godfather to their children, cried with them in the graveyards when their parents died. And yet, not one of them had stepped out once to greet his wife when she passed, proud head in the air, yellow star on her coat.
He knew the risks they too ran—told himself that maybe, probably, he wouldn’t have had the courage, either. The local Nazis were brutal enough, and there were German SS in town now as well. Still, would he have moved into another man’s house like that, or taken another man’s business, no questions asked?
Because that was part of it, too. No one seemed to be asking any questions. Wouldn’t he have at least gone to the prefecture and made a little inquiry?
But no one did—it was almost as if they blamed the people walking around with the stars. A kindhearted countrywoman in the grocery had asked his wife what they’d done. When she’d answered, “Nothing,” the woman had shrugged and said, “Well, but they don’t treat people like this for nothing.”
“That’s how they see us now!” his wife had cried that evening. “As criminals!”
“They’re the criminals,” he said, but whom did he mean? The woman in the store? The friends and neighbors who’d kept silent when at least they might have asked?
AND THERE WAS HIS OWN silence as well, the way he’d pushed it aside when he still could, when the stories he was hearing were still about someone else. People in Germany, people in Poland—how different had he been, from his neighbors here, who, though they’d had to watch their neighbors leave their lifelong homes with pots and pans banging in a mule cart, were still snug inside their own nice houses? And what if they had spoken out and then landed in the street themselves? How would that have helped Hermann?
Unless they’d all spoken out together—that would have been the thing. Not to let the monsters pick them off, one by one. It would happen one day, he assured his wife and daughters. Good people would come together. After all, the Nazis’ dream of oneness, of unity, could be remade to include them all.
All they had to do was take the hate out, and there could be something good there. He too would like a purification, a renewal, reaching back to old virtues. Wagner’s horns stirred somethin
g in his blood as well, and he remembered, as a boy, that feeling of singing all together in the school hall. And in the army too, marching all together. We are invincible, and one.
That had been attractive, almost irresistible, and as for the Germans who’d had no jobs after the war, and no money, Hitler, with all his yelling and thumping, was both offering work and bringing people together, with all that singing, all that marching, arms in the air, with the shouts, echoing off the walls, “Heil Hitler!” Appealing, he knew. Immensely appealing.
Especially when one could turn a blind eye to the dark side of the thing that was putting relatively small numbers of people in difficulty. Easy enough, as Hermann said, to look away as other people packed and left, or were shipped off to somewhere—few enough so you might not even notice.
Not at first, anyway, though there would come the time, he felt almost certain, when the Germans, highly civilized people after all, would surely take a breath and call a halt to the hatred. And in the meantime, he and his wife and daughters put their mattresses in one corner, their pots and pans in the other, and created order in the dark apartment where they’d landed, taking turns going down to the cellar at dawn for coal to make their ever-weaker tea.
Quite a change from the strong dark coffee with freshly baked rolls they used to have in the morning, “before,” but still it was something—he’d heard that people were going hungry in Poland. And there was something nice, too, about all sleeping in one room, where he could hear the comforting sounds of his daughters’ breathing. There were worse things in the world, much worse, than losing one’s house.
And before long, a sort of routine took form for them again, and became their life. Teachers, excluded from the public schools, started organizing classes for the excluded children, and Hermann’s daughters helped out, teaching music and French. Hermann himself was still working part time at his old business, and still had some savings in a bank box—Magda couldn’t remember afterwards how it had worked; maybe the bank hadn’t reported him. He had also buried some gold and silver in glass jars among the more distant fruit trees. With this, they should be able to eke out a life till the world came to its senses again.
The Plum Trees Page 5