All God's Children (6 page)

During this time they were all awakened for several nights in a row by the whine of the air-raid siren. There was no telling whether the siren signaled a practice drill or the real thing. But ever since the British had bombed Cologne in May, they took no chances. Beth wrapped herself in her robe and roused Liesl, who slept easily through the sound, and led her down the back stairs of the building to the courtyard and the entrance to the cramped, dank cellar beneath the bakery. Behind them came her aunt and uncle and the other residents of the building. Usually Ilse was crying hysterically, her hands clamped firmly over her ears as Franz tried without success to reassure her. Josef was always the last to join the group that crowded into the tight space of the cellar.

Each family had fallen into the habit of taking up the same place in the underground bunker. Beth and others in her family squeezed together inside the small room where the baker stored extra bags of flour. The floor where they huddled had once held burlap sacks bulging with the staple, but these days the space was almost empty. Lately Beth had noticed that only a couple of empty flour sacks and a half-dozen glass canning jars filled with the baker’s special spiced peaches were all that remained.

One night late in November and after more than a week’s reprieve from the ritual of moving to the cellar, they were jolted awake by the shriek of the sirens. Silently—except for Ilse’s sniffling—they made their way down from their apartment and took their places, as did their neighbors in the cubbyholes each of them had marked as a reasonably safe haven. Once Ilse and Franz were settled under the bottom row of shelving toward the back of the closet-like space, Beth sat on the floor and pulled Liesl onto her lap.

“Mama, don’t cry,” the child said sleepily. “It’s just the planes. They can’t hurt us here, can they, Papa?”

“That’s right, Liebchen,” Franz replied as he held Ilse, rocking her as if she, not Liesl, were the child.

Beth watched as Josef positioned the light he carried so that he could see that the others from the building had all made it down safely; then he helped one of their neighbors close the heavy cellar doors. After that he crouched next to her in the only space remaining and flicked off the light. In the dark and silence of their hiding place, they could hear the now-muffled sound of the siren followed by the steady and ominous drone of a fleet of airplanes. This time the warning had been real. When the echo of the first wave of bombs finding their target reached them, the glass jars rattled on the shelf above their heads, and Ilse cried out.

Beth covered Liesl’s ears by cradling the child closer to her chest and sang to her. She could feel Josef’s shoulder pressed against hers, and she was surprised to realize that she took comfort in that. On the one occasion when he had not been with them during the air raid, she had missed his nearness even though that had been only a practice.

Another wave of bombs struck their target—this time much closer— and Beth could not help but give voice to her own fear. Immediately she felt Josef’s arm come around her shoulders. “It’s all right,” he said, his mouth so close to her ear that his breath was like a warm breeze. “They aren’t as near as it sounds. Keep singing.”

They stayed that way until the all-clear signal reached them. “There,” Franz said to Ilse, as he clicked on his flashlight. “You see? It’s all over.”

Ilse blinked in the sudden light and focused her attention on Josef’s arm still around Beth’s shoulders. “We can go back to our apartment now,” she said as she stood and reached for Liesl.

“I can take her,” Beth said.

“You seem to be otherwise occupied,” Ilse replied with a curt nod toward Josef. She lifted Liesl into her arms and waited for Franz and a neighbor to open the cellar doors so she could pass. Beth and Josef followed Ilse from the tiny room with Josef lighting the way up the back stairs of their building until they reached the door to their apartment.

“We should all have a cup of tea,” Franz suggested. “Calm our nerves so we can get back to sleep.”

Ilse made no reply as Beth watched her aunt continue down the hall to Liesl’s bedroom.

“Ilse?” Franz followed his wife down the hall.

“I did not mean to upset your aunt,” Josef said as he stood at the foot of the stairs to the attic.

“You didn’t. It’s all of this that upsets her—the uncertainty of everything.” She folded the coverlet she had used to wrap around Liesl and clutched it to her.

“Ja, my mother is the same. Sometimes I think it is harder for their generation because they have been through so much—the war before and the struggles after that and now again.”

It was the first time that Josef had spoken of his parents.

“And your father?”

“My father is…my father will always do what he thinks necessary to survive.” There was no mistaking the resignation and disappointment in his voice, but he recovered quickly and smiled at her. “Now perhaps we might talk about your singing voice,” he teased.

Beth blushed. “My brothers have always said that I could not carry a tune in a bucket,” she admitted. “You have a very nice voice.”

He bowed to her. “Why thank you, Fräulein.”

“I dance better than I sing,” she added and immediately wondered why she was pursuing this conversation.

“Prove it.” He held out his hand to her, and when she placed her hand in his, he guided her into a pirouette. “Very nice,” he said. “Very nice indeed.”

Late into the night and all of the following day Josef thought about his father. It was true what he had told Beth. His father would do whatever he thought necessary to make certain that his family was safe and that they came out of this war unscathed.
As if anyone could
, he thought as he recalled the sirens and the panic and the sheer exhaustion of being emotionally spent that came along with the all-clear signal.

He thought about the things he had heard about and witnessed firsthand during the months he’d served as a medic in France. There had been the time he’d been taking the train from one assignment to another. The train had stopped briefly at a small town, and Josef had gotten off to stretch his legs. He’d lit a cigarette—a rare vice he allowed himself now and again—and started walking along the platform.

He heard a commotion in the village square behind the station and followed the sound. Several other soldiers had gathered around a crowd of townspeople to watch whatever was happening in their midst. There was laughter and cheers, and when Josef was able to work his way into an opening so he could see the source of the crowd’s entertainment, he could not believe his eyes.

An elderly man—Jewish given his skull cap and beard—was on his hands and knees, crawling around on the hard cobblestones and barking like a dog. Standing over him was his “master”—a brawny, red faced man wearing the insignia of a German lieutenant and shouting out orders. If the old man did not obey the commands quickly enough, the lieutenant kicked him and struck him with a riding crop. Nearby another soldier held his pistol to the head of a white-haired woman.

Josef was paralyzed with shock. This was happening in broad daylight, in full view of anyone passing by, in full view of the shops that lined the square. It was incomprehensible. Whatever the man’s crime might be, this was intolerable. It was obscene.

He made a move toward the soldier with the pistol but felt a hand grip his shoulder and pull him back. “Leave it,” whispered a burly bearded man with the saddest eyes that Josef had ever seen. He glanced at those around them—all laughing and pointing and enjoying the spectacle. Fathers had hoisted children onto their shoulders to give them a better view.

“You’ll get them both killed,” the man added.

“But…”

All around them the crowd groaned with disappointment, and Josef turned to see what had happened. The old man lay on the ground, unable to respond to his master’s kicks or commands. The soldier lashed him with the riding crop, and when the man did not respond, he looked up at the crowd and shrugged. “Show’s over, folks. We’ve got a train to catch.”

The other soldier released the woman, shoving her onto the ground next to the inert body of her husband, and joined his buddies as they headed back toward the station, laughing as they lit their cigarettes and mimicked the man’s barking.

Josef turned to tell the man in the crowd that he was a doctor, but the man had disappeared, swallowed up in the throng of people now going about their business as if nothing had happened. “I’m a doctor,” he repeated quietly as he edged his way to where the woman covered her husband’s body with her own and murmured words of comfort to him.

She glanced up, and the hope that filled her eyes turned instantly to hate. “You have killed him, so why not shoot me as well?” she said, and Josef understood that in his uniform he appeared no different to this woman than the man who had tormented her husband or held the gun to her head. “Go on,” she growled, her eyes bright with loathing. She pointed to the center of her forehead. “Here—shoot me here, you monster.”

Behind him the train whistle sounded. Around him people kept their distance from the old couple in the street. Across the way he saw the man who had stopped him, sweeping the sidewalk outside a floral shop. The man signaled that he should go, and it suddenly occurred to Josef that this was not a one-time event. The people in this village— those who were not Aryan—had been through similar humiliations before.

Slowly he backed away, and when the train whistle blasted a second time, he turned from the couple and ran for the train. He had just settled into his seat when the train began to move away from the station, away from the town, away from the shopkeeper who was now lifting the old man’s body high in his arms.

The scene haunted Josef for days, and when he returned to Munich, he told his father about what he had seen. “These things happen in times of war,” his father said without a trace of shock or reproach.

“But these were soldiers—
Deutschland
soldiers—a ranking officer among them,” he had protested. “This is not who we are, how we conduct ourselves. Why we…”

His father had looked at him with something akin to pity. “Again in time of war…Do not go stirring the pot, son. There will be time enough once the war ends to set things right. There always is.”

“And are the actions of Hitler and his government a way of setting things right, Father? By blaming others for what happened in the past, for the losses and hardships suffered?”

His father’s eyes had flashed with anger. “You know nothing of what we suffered. You were a boy, and blessedly I was able to keep you and your mother from having to—”

“And that man in the street made to kneel in the hot sun and bark like a dog for the amusement of others? What about his family? His right to—”

“You do not know what crime this man was guilty of.”

“Whatever that old man’s so-called crime, we have laws and courts and such to determine his guilt and set his sentence, Father. Or at least we used to.”

Josef had left the house that day and stayed with a fellow student until the professor had extended the invitation to come and board with his family. And he had made the decision to find some way that he might fight to restore the Germany of his youth—the homeland that he loved.

    CHAPTER 4