The Living and the Lost

by Ellen Feldman

  “What?” Her voice was startled. She knew the question was rhetorical, but she still didn’t like it.

  “All I’m saying,” he went on, “is maybe the ones who stayed—not the sycophant with his fictional Jewish fiancée but some of the others who really didn’t join the party or stop talking to their Jewish friends, but who also didn’t flee, even if they had the chance—deserve the benefit of an open mind.”

  It was a nice theory, she supposed, if your name was Sutton, you spoke the King’s English, and you had witnessed things from across an ocean. But if your name was Meike Mosbach—Meike Sarah Mosbach, because when the Nazis came to power they added “Sarah” to every Jewish girl’s name and “Israel” to every Jewish boy’s—and you had the chance to leave, you grabbed it. No matter what the cost. She had to keep reminding herself of that.

  “The you in my question was hypothetical,” he went on. “I was talking about Germans, not German Jews. If they had the chance to leave, they would have been fools not to grab it.”

  * * *

  She was putting on her coat to leave the office at the end of the day when Theo Wallach appeared in the doorway. Before Major Sutton had started the interrogations that morning, he’d taken her around the office to introduce her to the other three interviewers in this part of the department. She’d expected hostility, or at least skepticism: What was a woman doing in a man’s job? During her years at a women’s college she’d been spared the question, but in her job at the magazine she’d kept coming up against it, or rather against the assumption that once the war was over she’d step aside to let a deserving man take her place, and go back where she belonged, wherever that was. To her surprise this morning, she’d been welcomed. All three of them—Theo Wallach, Werner Kahn, and Jack Craig—assured her they were drowning in Fragebogen and needed all the help they could get. Theo Wallach added that it would be nice to have a girl on the team.

  She wasn’t entirely surprised by the comment. As Private Meer and any number of other GIs had made clear, American girls were rare birds in Occupied Berlin. But she hadn’t expected it from this particular GI. Theo Wallach had the appearance of a tough guy straight out of central casting. She had the feeling that wasn’t entirely an accident. He looked as if he worked at it, though the physical features helped. His eyes were dark beneath brows that met in a rage over a surprisingly snub nose. The only feature that softened the effect was the thick fringe of lashes most girls would sell their souls for. He wasn’t tall, barely an inch or two taller than she was in her regulation low-heeled oxfords, but he was compact and quick on his feet. Even standing still, he gave the impression of being ready to spring.

  “We have Schmidt and Weber,” Jack Craig had said.

  “I said girl, not Kraut gold digger,” Theo had answered.

  He stood now with his hands in the pockets of his trousers leaning against the doorjamb. No German would lounge against a doorjamb like that, especially in an office, especially in uniform. He was showing off his Americanization, but it was a masquerade. He wasn’t relaxed. She had the feeling he never relaxed.

  “How did your first day go?”

  “I’m not sure I’m cut out for this.”

  “Sensibilities too tender?”

  “Mind too closed.”

  “That’s our gallant leader speaking. The trouble with Sutton is he thinks he’s back on the playing fields of Harvard. Nice shot, old boy, and all that crap.”

  “I take it you don’t agree with his stand.”

  “Eighteen.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The number of family members I lost in the camps. And I’m talking immediate consanguinity, not distant relatives. Nice irony, don’t you think? Eighteen is chai in Hebrew. Life.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Do you smoke?” he asked.

  “Occasionally, but no thanks, not now.”

  He shook his head. “I wasn’t offering you a cigarette. I was giving you advice. Take up the habit more seriously. I chain-smoke through every interview. It unmans the customers completely. They’re so busy looking at the cigarette, inhaling the aroma, remembering the taste, salivating over the damn thing that they can’t remember the lies they told on their Fragebogen. That’s how I catch them out.”

  “A whole new form of psychological warfare.”

  “It works. I’ll let you sit in on one of my interrogations sometime. They’re a far cry from Major Fair Play’s.”

  “I suppose he has a point.”

  “Don’t you believe it.”

  Five

  Meike lay on the floor with her ear against the register. Below her in the parlor her parents were whispering, as they did far into the night these days. Whispering, because they didn’t dare speak in English or French. David and Meike knew those languages. Even Sarah could recognize a few words and phrases. Yiddish, which many older people used to keep things from the children, was no alternative. Her mother barely knew it, and it was too close to German anyway. So since other languages were not a possibility, night after night they went into the parlor, pulled closed the sliding doors, and whispered in their own. They thought they were protecting the children. They didn’t realize that the heat register carried sounds up to Meike’s room. If they had, they would have locked themselves in a closet or stood out on the street. Anything to shield the children.

  The funny thing was that it started with the children. Or at least the children brought it home to them.

  One day shortly before her fifteenth birthday Meike returned from the Lyzeum with a peculiar story. The teacher had told the students to take out their German history books. Then he passed out a single-edged razor blade to each of them. A murmur ran through the class, part excitement, part apprehension. When had they ever been handed such dangerous objects? The teacher turned to the blackboard and began writing numbers on it. “These are the pages you are to cut out of your books,” he explained as the chalk screeched against the blackboard. He was excited too, or perhaps merely fearful. That was why the chalk broke. He bent to retrieve the two pieces and went on writing with one of them. “Be sure to leave the margin of the old pages so you can paste in the new pages,” he told them as he scrawled a long line of numbers.

  The exercise was peculiar, and Meike couldn’t make sense of it, until she began reading the pages she was supposed to discard. Every one of them mentioned a Jew who had made some contribution to German history or culture.

  She saw the look that passed between her parents when she told them about the class that night.

  The second incident occurred a few weeks later. David was late returning from school. When he arrived home, the sleeve of his Gymnasium uniform had been torn off, his shirt was bloodied, and his nose was beginning to swell. Their mother chipped a piece of ice from the block at the bottom of the icebox, wrapped it in a towel, and told him to hold it to his nose. Then she took him into the bathroom to clean his wounds. Meike and Sarah stood in the doorway to the bathroom watching until their mother noticed Sarah and gestured to Meike to take her away. But later that night after their mother had washed and iodined his cuts and bruises and their father had returned from his clinic and made sure she’d done a thorough job, David told Meike what had happened, though she knew her mother had told him not to. They had to protect the children, even from each other, or at least from each other’s knowledge.

  Three boys had chased him down an alley. He was fast on his feet and sure he’d escaped until he saw two more boys coming at him from the other direction. He knew them all. Three were in his class, two in the class ahead. One had been his best friend until a year or so ago. They’d taken turns, four of them holding him down while the fifth punched and kicked him. The worst part, he told her, and she could tell how hard he was fighting the tears, was the end. He’d thought it was over. He’d wanted to stand up and walk out of the alley. He’d even started to. But then one of the boys had pushed him back again, and he hurt too much to fight. He curled on his side
with his hands over his head, waiting for them to leave. But they were not quite finished. One of the boys taunted his former best friend for being a Jew-lover. He hadn’t punched and kicked hard enough. The others took up the cry. The former best friend had to prove his mettle. He unbuttoned his pants, took out his penis, and peed on David.

  “And I took it.” Now he was crying. He hadn’t in front of his mother, and especially not in front of his father, but he did now in front of her.

  “It would have been worse if you’d tried to fight back. There were five of them and one of you.”

  “I still should have tried,” he said, and his thirteen-year-old voice cracked, not with growing pains but with shame.

  That was the night the whispering began.

  “I’ve had enough,” her mother said. “We leave.”

  “They’re isolated incidents,” her father insisted.

  “Isolated incidents! You call boycotts of all Jewish shops and businesses isolated incidents? You call boys and grown men too scrawling ugly words and Stars of David on the doors and windows isolated incidents?”

  “They’re riffraff. Not the real Germany.”

  “Riffraff is the real Germany now, Max. Maybe it always was.”

  “Don’t say that, Gerda. I fought for this country. I was wounded for it. I was awarded the Iron Cross.”

  “Did your precious Iron Cross save David this afternoon? Did it excuse you from the law forbidding Jewish doctors to treat anyone but Jews? Does it help you when gentile patients, former gentile patients, tell you they don’t have to pay you what they owe because you’re a Jew and all debts to Jews have been canceled? Your precious Iron Cross is worthless. It doesn’t exist. When the history books list the men who won it, Max Mosbach’s name will have been sliced out with a razor.”

  The whispering went on that way. Sometimes her father persuaded her mother things would get better. They only had to be patient. Sometimes her mother convinced her father they should start writing anyone they knew in America and England and applying for visas.

  Then one night changed everything, or perhaps Millie only saw it that way because she associated the incident not with her parents’ whispering or David’s beating, but with Sarah. Hindsight always paints a different picture.

  She was sitting at the desk in her room, in her nightdress. She’d already gone to bed, but a realization that she’d mistranslated a word in her Cicero assignment had propelled her out from under the eiderdown back to her book. She made the correction and was about to turn out the light and return to bed when she heard the sound. It was coming from the direction of the Tiergarten. At first all she could make out was a low murmur. Gradually it grew louder and closer. The volume of voices was building. The noise of shuffling on the street was mounting. Then it was right beneath her window, a thunderous roar of voices and pounding of boots. The room, in shadows except for the circle of light cast by the lamp on her desk, flamed with a rosy glow. She got up from her desk, moved to the window, and opened the curtains a crack. Dozens of torches were snaking down the street. Dozens and dozens, maybe hundreds and hundreds, of men were marching beneath them. Their footfalls made the street tremble. Their voices, no, their single voice, roared. The words, half shouted, half sung, echoed off the stone and brick and wood of the buildings and soared up into the heavens. “When the blood of the Jews flows from the knife, all is great.”

  As she stood watching them go by, she felt something pulling at her nightdress. She looked down. Sarah was looking up at her.

  “Can I get in bed with you?”

  She closed the curtains, helped Sarah up onto the bed, climbed in after her, and pulled the eiderdown over both of them.

  “Go to sleep,” she whispered.

  “I’m scared.”

  “There’s nothing to be scared of,” she lied. “I’m here. Big sisters don’t let anything bad happen to little sisters. Now go to sleep.”

  Sarah, her face pink with the light that was still flaming from the street below, lay looking up at her. Meike scrunched her features into a monkey face that always made Sarah giggle. She didn’t giggle, but she did look less frightened.

  “I’ll go to sleep if you scratch my back.”

  “You’re incorrigible.”

  “What’s incorrigible?”

  “Little sisters who will use any trick in the book to get their backs scratched.”

  Sarah grinned. The gap in her front teeth showed. The Zahnfee had come only the night before to leave a coin under the pillow. She turned over with her back to Meike.

  “You’re too close,” Meike said. “I can’t move my arm.”

  Sarah scuttled a few inches away. “Is that better?”

  “Perfect.”

  Meike began to scratch. Her hand worked its way up and down the skinny back, from one side to the other. Beneath the flannel nightgown and warm skin, the shoulder blades felt fragile as twigs.

  Six

  Major Sutton was sitting behind his desk, smiling. The expression was genuine, as if he was actually amused and not merely out to disarm.

  “Fraulein Schmidt said you wanted to see me.” Millie took the chair on the other side of his desk.

  “Why does your voice always take on an edge when you mention her name?”

  “Is that what you wanted to see me about?”

  “No, I’m just curious.”

  “I guess because she looks as if she just stepped out of a prewar ad for a Volksfest in Bavaria. And we know how those turned out.”

  “She’s actually from Frankfurt, but I get your point. What about Fraulein Weber? Is she more to your liking?”

  “She looks as if she’s getting ready to audition for Lola in The Blue Angel. Not the Dietrich glamour, but the air of disrepute.”

  “Fraulein Weber—” he started, then stopped. “You don’t take any prisoners, do you?” he said instead.

  She decided not to answer that.

  “But our Frauleins, as you intuited, are not what I wanted to talk to you about. Do you remember a Jürgen Steeber?” She thought for a minute. “You gave him the highest clearance.”

  “Oh, yes. He was in a concentration camp.”

  “Do you know what he was in the camp for?”

  “Did they need a reason?”

  “True, but there was usually an official one listed in the records.”

  She thought for another moment. “The magazine he published. Subversive contents, if I remember correctly.”

  “Subversive is one way of putting it.”

  She waited, trying to figure out where this was going.

  “Herr Steeber’s magazine was a Wehrmacht favorite, passed from hand to hand among officers and enlisted men alike. Even at the front. You know, Eros and Thanatos. Or didn’t they teach that at Bryn Mawr?”

  She was beginning to catch on. “Are you kidding? It was the most popular major.”

  “The magazine was pornography. They didn’t lock him up for his political opinions. They locked him up for undermining the morale of the troops, or perhaps only enervating them. Don’t misunderstand me. I have nothing against either literature of a certain hue or debilitating enemy troops. I just don’t think Herr Steeber is qualified to run a major newspaper or magazine in our new fumigated Germany.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He tipped his chair back and put his feet on the desk. It wasn’t the first time she wondered how an officer in the U.S. Army got by with such scuffed shoes. “Don’t be. We get few enough laughs around here. My only regret is that I can’t dine out on the story.”

  “Why not?”

  “I protect my people. Even the ones who pulled strings to get here. Maybe especially the ones who pulled strings to get here.”

  Until now, he’d never mentioned the letters Russell Bennett had written on her behalf.

  “The only question is why.”

  “Why what?”

  “Why you were so eager to get over here.”

  “I thought we went thr
ough that.”

  “Ah, yes, all those Fragebogen that need translating.” He leaned forward and handed her the pornographer’s file. “Just downgrade him a little. He was no Nazi, but we still don’t want him using American taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars to put out a girlie magazine.

  “Oh, and going from titillation to outrage or heartbreak or whatever the bloody hell you want to call it, take a look at this.” He handed her a newspaper. She glanced down at it. Der Weg. “The Jewish community organization is already getting out a paper. Of course, they don’t have to worry about old Nazis popping up in their midst the way we do, though I wouldn’t rule out some of them trying. A year ago, a card identifying you as Jewish was the kiss of death. Now it’s the hottest ticket in town. Jumps you up a notch in the food ration and housing sweepstakes. Might even let you keep your stolen flat or filched paintings. I wouldn’t be surprised if those cards start showing up on the black market. One more irony of the demise of the Thousand-Year Reich.”

  “I’m glad you can joke about it.”

  He stopped smiling. “Mind if I give you a piece of advice, Millie? Mind, for that matter, if I call you Millie?”

  She shrugged.

  “Take it easy. You keep going at this boil, and you’re going to flame out in one or two months’ time. To mix my heat metaphors.”

  “If you say so, sir.”

  He shook his head. “As I said, no prisoners. But take a look at the newspaper. We don’t have to worry about this one the way we do the propaganda sheets the Soviets are turning out, but we ought to know what’s going on.”

  She knew what was going on. At least, she could imagine the stories in that paper. David came home with them every night, or the nights he came home. “You wouldn’t like to give it to Jack or Werner or Theo?” she asked.

  “Jack can barely keep his mind on his work during office hours. After seventeen hundred hours he’s too besotted with his Fraulein to see straight. Werner’s busy with the Russkies, trying to untangle some mess about a screenwriter they won’t clear. And I’m not about to give this to Theo. The anti-German chip on his shoulder makes yours look like a splinter. My only consolation is that you’re immune to his passes. At least you seem to be. I shudder to think what would happen if you two got together. Just take a look at the paper so we know what’s going on,” he repeated.