The Living and the Lost

by Ellen Feldman

  She wandered over. “You’re not Fraulein inclined?”

  “They’re nice enough gals.”

  “I hear a but.”

  He moved his coffee to the hand that was holding the doughnut, reached into his pocket with his free hand, drew out a picture, and handed it to her.

  She took it from him and studied it for a moment. “Your wife and son?”

  He grinned and nodded.

  He wasn’t a kid, and something about him said he’d been flying for some time. He didn’t have to be here. “In that case, why aren’t you back there with them?”

  He shrugged.

  She waited. He obviously wasn’t much of a talker, but she had a feeling he wanted to say something about this.

  He took a bite of doughnut and chewed, then drained the coffee container and crumpled it. “It’s funny,” he said finally. “I got everything I ever wanted. The two of them.” He took the picture she was still holding and put it back in his pocket. “I even got a house, thanks to Uncle Sam. Think of that, me owning a house.”

  He stopped. She waited.

  “But something didn’t sit right. I kept having these dreams about being back in the cockpit.”

  “You mean you missed flying?”

  He shook his head. “Nah. I like it. When I make some money, maybe I’ll do it again, like a hobby. But that’s not what I mean.”

  Again she waited.

  “I kept dreaming about being over the target and watching the bombs fall. I liked making the target, but I didn’t like the bombs. I mean it wasn’t like I was bombing Hitler or Göring or those guys. I was killing women and children. It was my job, but that didn’t mean I liked it. So now I’m doing this. Don’t get me wrong. I know this doesn’t make up for it.” He hesitated. “But it’s gotta count for something.”

  She hadn’t taken a single note. She didn’t want him to stop talking. But she knew she’d remember every word.

  * * *

  She’d planned to fly home from Wiesbaden the following day, but when she reached her hotel, she found a wire from Jeanette Wolff, a Jewish survivor who’d lost two daughters in the camps and was now a West Berlin city councilor. Frau Wolff, who had recently been beaten up by Communist protestors in the municipal assembly, would be happy to grant Millie the interview she’d requested. There was nothing she could do but postpone her flight to the States and hitch a ride back to Berlin on another cargo plane the next morning.

  She came out of her hotel into an overcast summer morning. It was Friday. In the annals of the Berlin Airlift, it would become known as Black Friday.

  By the time she reached the airport, it was raining. This time she boarded a C-50. It was larger than the C-47 and could carry more cargo. Nonetheless, the takeoff wasn’t much worse than the one three days earlier, though it certainly wasn’t any better. They were near the end of the runway when the plane finally shuddered aloft.

  She was hoping they’d get above the clouds, but they never managed to. Her heart seemed to leap into her throat with every plunge of the plane. She clutched the seat with each roll. She tried not to think of how bumpy the descent would be. This was terrifying enough. She didn’t care what those predictions about the future said. She’d never get used to flying.

  Once again, the descent was sharp and terrifying. Her ears were throbbing, but this time she couldn’t see the ground coming up to meet them. She told herself that was better.

  “Jesus,” the officer strapped in across from her said, “the cloud cover goes right down to the roofs.”

  She heard muffled sounds coming from the cockpit.

  “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

  “The rain is messing with the radar,” another voice shouted.

  They were suddenly out of the clouds, but too low. Through the window across from her, she saw buildings speeding past. The plane was bouncing over the tarmac, veering wildly from side to side. The buildings gave way to trees. The plane lurched onto its side. She heard a thunderous crack. They came to a stop.

  She struggled to undo her seat belt. The metal fastening was stuck. She finally pried it open and tried to scramble out of her seat, but the plane had thrown her on her back. She reached for the overhead. It was too far above her. She tried to leverage herself out of the seat. Gravity held her in place. She flailed her arms and churned her legs. Another noise was crackling through the plane. It sounded like the end of the world. The window across from her flamed red. Then everything went black.

  * * *

  The face looming over her was familiar, but it took her a moment to place it. Dr. Pinsky. She hadn’t thought of him in years. She must be dreaming. Or dead. Except she couldn’t be dead because she hurt too much.

  “We have to stop meeting like this,” the face said. “I’m Dr. Pinsky. Do you remember?”

  She nodded. That hurt too. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “I might ask you the same question.”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “The plane overshot the runway and crashed. Then two others piled up after it. No fatalities, fortunately, but a couple of you are in here. Here is the 279th Station Hospital. Again. You’re going to be fine. Nothing life threatening. Just one broken arm, two broken ribs, and—”

  “A partridge in a pear tree.”

  “And a lot of bruises and contusions. You’re going to feel pretty sore for a while. And I’d stay away from mirrors. But keep up the good spirits.”

  “Can I wire my husband?”

  “We already did.”

  “Thanks,” she said and was asleep by the end of the word.

  * * *

  Harry spent the next several days calling, wiring, and pleading with everyone he still knew in the Army. He was a retired major. He had connections. He ought to have some clout. They could get him anywhere, they assured him, except Berlin. He’d heard about the airlift, hadn’t he?

  * * *

  “What are you doing still here?” she asked Dr. Pinsky again the next time she saw him.

  “Avna, that’s my wife, got pregnant two months before I was supposed to be discharged. I wasn’t about to leave her here alone until we could get her out. She’s Polish. So I re-upped, and we’re still here.” He hesitated. “Do you ever hear from Mary Jo?”

  “She married the boy next door. Literally. I wasn’t invited to the wedding.”

  “Funny how these things turn out.”

  “At the risk of sounding like a Pollyanna, from the way your voice caresses the name Avna, I’d say for the best.”

  He smiled as he went on percussing her chest—he was worried, he said, about one of the broken ribs piercing her lung—and as he did, she went on thinking about Mary Jo. She’d left Friendship to see the world and returned to it when the world became too discomfiting. Millie couldn’t help wondering whether, as the years went by, the experience would make Mary Jo a better or at least more tolerant person, or if she’d come to regard it as a youthful folly and, finally, a shameful interlude that must never be mentioned in front of the children. Mustn’t let them know that Mommy had almost married a Jew.

  * * *

  He kept her in the hospital for four days. He said he was worried about injuries they couldn’t see. She didn’t know if he was talking about physical or mental wounds and didn’t ask. Neither did she try to talk her way out. At night, in her dreams, she was back in the burning plane. Once a young nurse shook her awake.

  “It’s all right,” the nurse said. “You’re safe.”

  During the day, other images and sounds assaulted her. The conversations with David ran in her head. You were just following instructions, he said. Harry’s words came back to her. She who saves one life saves the world. And one other exchange echoed again and again.

  Your father gave you life, Millie. He’d want you to grab it.

  * * *

  She had no trouble hitching a ride back to Wiesbaden once she was discharged from the hospital, though they were flying out more DPs, and the stripped-
down cabin was crowded with men and women and children, lots of children. Like the black market, the orgy of hope, marriage, and procreation was still going strong.

  It took another two days to get a flight back to the States. This one went to New York. Harry was waiting at the gate at Idlewild. She ran toward him through the long fingers of the setting sun. When she reached him, she threw her good arm, the one that wasn’t in a cast, around his neck. He held her more gingerly.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “I won’t break, if that’s what you mean.” She tightened her grip on him.

  “Really all right?”

  “Really.”

  They were talking about her injuries from the plane crash, but they were talking about more than that. They were talking about Berlin. Still.

  They didn’t return to the subject until they were in the depths of New Jersey. She began to tell him about her stay in the hospital, not the nightmares that the nurse had awakened her from, but the days of turning things over in her mind.

  “Funny how a near-death experience focuses your thinking,” he said.

  “I made some decisions.”

  “Want to let me in on any of them?”

  “The diaphragm is on the way out.”

  “You won’t get an argument from me about that. Anything else?”

  She hesitated. “It occurred to me that I might not feel so guilty, so cruel, so heartless…” She stopped again.

  “Running out of self-indictments?”

  “No, it’s just hard to say. I might have an easier time if I didn’t think of a child as a replacement for Sarah. Sarah’s gone. Naming a child after her won’t bring her back. It will just make me more, I don’t know, more afraid, more clingy. Like Anna when she first got Elke back.”

  “Did it ever occur to you we could have a boy?”

  “That’s the funny thing. Of course I know we could, but whenever I think about having a baby, I think about a girl. The Sarah syndrome again. It’ll make me crazy, and it won’t be any good for the child. That’s why I’ve decided if we do have a girl, I don’t want to name her Sarah.”

  “Whatever you say.” He switched on the headlights, and the twin beams pierced the shadows of the dying day.

  They were silent for a few miles, and when he spoke again, she could tell from his voice that the serious part of the discussion was over, for the moment.

  “At the risk of being premature, what are we going to name this soon-to-be-conceived baby girl? If I know you, you already have a list.”

  “No list. Just a name.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “Victoria.”

  The car veered toward the shoulder of the road, and in the light from the oncoming traffic she saw him wince. He wrenched the wheel to get them back into the lane, and by the time the headlights of another oncoming car illuminated his face, he’d got his expression under control.

  “If it’s all right with you.”

  He took a while to answer. “It’s a good name,” he said finally.

  She supposed that was the way it would always be between them, bumps and swerves and close calls, as they moved forward into the past.

  Sources and Acknowledgments

  Among the scores of excellent books on the Allied Occupation of Berlin and the part that Jewish GIs played in it and in the war, three were especially useful: Sons and Soldiers by Bruce Henderson, Jews, Germans, and Allies by Atina Grossmann, and Exorcising Hitler by Frederick Taylor.

  In addition to books and memoirs, many people provided professional and personal support. I am grateful to Carolyn Waters and the entire staff of the New York Society Library for their expert help and unfailing humor; to the Fredrick Lewis Allen Room of the New York Public Library, which provides a safe haven for research and writing; and to Eric Pumroy, the archivist at Bryn Mawr College. I am also indebted to Noah Reibel for introducing me to Kay Boyle’s accounts of the Occupation; Christine Smith for sharing her memories of the Berlin Airlift; Helga Warren for her expertise in the nuances of the German language; Stacy Schiff and Laurie Blackburn for listening and suggesting and listening some more; and Elizabeth Church and Ed Gallagher. Fred Allen and Richard Snow once again kept me on the historical and literary straight and narrow, and whether she knows it or not, Liza Bennett’s fingerprints are all over this book. My special thanks go to Gail Hochman, an extraordinary agent and valued friend whom I was so lucky to find again after too many years apart; her terrific sidekick, the indefatigable Marianne Merola; Jennifer Fernandez, Olga Grlic, and the entire team at St. Martin’s Press; and to Elisabeth Dyssegaard, whom I cannot thank enough for her light but sure editorial touch and the kid gloves with which she wields it.

  Reading Group Gold

  THE LIVING AND THE LOST

  by Ellen Feldman

  Keep On Reading

  • Reading Group Questions

  • Movies & Books

  Get to Know the Author

  • A Conversation with Ellen Feldman

  Also available as an audiobook from Macmillan Audio

  For more reading group suggestions visit www.readinggroupgold.com.

  Reading Group Questions

    1.  As children in Germany, Millie, David, Harry, and Theo suffered similar persecution. How can you explain their widely different attitudes to the Occupation and the German people?

    2.  Do you think their treatment when they arrived in the U.S. further shaped and hardened their reactions?

    3.  Early in the novel, a near riot occurs over a dollhouse, which, like the Biedermeier breakfront in Millie’s apartment, may or may not have been appropriated from the homes of Jews who were sent to the camps. How do we, who were not there, sort out guilt, complicity, and innocence? Do we have a right to condemn or to forgive?

    4.  Determining guilt, innocence, and the degrees of complicity between them are dicey matters. How do you deal with someone like the German who was probably a Nazi sympathizer but now claims a clearly imaginary Jewish fiancée? The woman whose autistic son was murdered in an institution? Fraulein Weber, whose father and older brother were killed by the Nazis and whose younger brother was killed by the Americans or British in battle and who, along with her mother, was raped by the Russians?

    5.  Frau Kneff was obviously wrong to “kidnap” Elke, but she had saved her during the war and she loved her. Do you think it was in Elke’s best interest to be torn away from the only mother she’d ever known?

    6.  While she’s at Bryn Mawr, Millie goes home on two separate weekends with two friends whose families are very different. She finds both experiences unsettling. Discuss the differences between the families and the diverse effects they have on Millie.

    7.  Fleeing Nazi persecution, Millie and David encounter Jewish prejudice against Blacks on the ship, anti-Semitism in America, and after the war, rules preventing Jews from serving in the Occupation. Were American policies and beliefs hypocritical? Do you think they have changed?

    8.  Millie’s friend Mary Jo believes that neither she nor her parents are anti-Semitic. She has even fallen in love with a Jewish man. Yet she is shocked that his family would be as offended by his marrying her—a Christian— as hers is by her marrying him. Discuss the subtleties and blindness of her assumptions.

    9.  After Millie discovers Harry is Jewish, she sees him differently. Is this another form of prejudice? And what of Harry’s insistence that though he’s not a believer, as long as there are disadvantages to being a Jew he’ll be one?

  10.  David talks about how the Occupation forces prefer dealing with the nice clean, blond, blue-eyed Germans rather than the survivors of the camps, who are plagued by lice, TB, and other diseases and have been turned almost feral by brutality. What does this say about human nature and the ability to feel compassion?

  11.  What makes Millie suddenly see the Biedermeier breakfront with new eyes?

  12.
  The GIs and the Frauleins who took up with them were young. The men had lived through a war; the girls had never known a world without it. Do you sympathize with them for grasping at pleasure?

  13.  Millie is consumed by survivor guilt which, due to her actions in the railroad station, takes the form of shame. Late in the novel she muses on this:

  “Loss can be consoled. Pain can be solaced. But there is no comfort for shame. Because shame is not the result of a wrong suffered but of a wrong committed. Nothing can breech the isolation of that. Not sympathy. Not sex. Not even love.”

  Do you think the love she found with Harry will breech the shame? Do you think the fact that he too is haunted by survivor guilt will make overcoming the shame easier or more difficult for each of them?

  Movies & Books

  The Allied Occupation in Film and on the Page

  While scores of movies have been made and novels and memoirs written about World War II, the Allied Occupation that followed it has attracted less attention. We abhor war, but are clearly fascinated by it. Nonetheless, many of the films and books that do exist provide a riveting glimpse, sometimes grim, occasionally hilarious, into that postwar world.

  Perhaps the best-known movie—or one of the two best-known (see below for the second)—about the Occupation is Judgment at Nuremburg. If nothing else, and there’s a great deal else, the cast of this film about the trial of Nazi war criminals is huge and stunning. Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, and Marlene Dietrich headline, but no matter how many times I’ve seen the movie, and I’ve seen it often, Judy Garland and Montgomery Clift as survivors testifying during the trials are the ones who break my heart. Dietrich is wonderfully cynical as a Nazi officer’s widow, and a scene at the end between Tracy and Lancaster never fails to strike me with a beautiful if overly simplified moral clarity.