Secrets She Kept (11 page)

And provided brainwashing, from everything I’ve read.
“So, Mama was part of the BDM?”

“At first. But she was not regular in her attendance.”

“Is that because she took care of Grandmother
 
—Grossmutter?”

“Perhaps . . . at first. Sadly, after Elsa’s death, she spent a great deal of unsupervised time. Rudy was diligent in his studies and training, and your Grossvater worked very hard in those days.”

“What di
 
—”

“Your Mutter became involved with a fanatical group, much to the embarrassment of her parents and to the detriment of her Vater’s reputation. I’m sorry to say that she was not concerned with the shame she brought upon her family.” Dr. Peterson’s tone spoke as much disapproval as his words.

Shame? Mama?
“Mama was always very strict with me. As poor as our relationship was, it’s hard to imagine her bringing shame on anyone.”

Dr. Peterson removed his glasses. Rubbing the bridge of his nose, he sighed again. “Perhaps her strictness with you was how she reconciled her behavior in later years. It was, in some ways, a relief when she ran away.”

“She ran away?”

He closed the album. “I have no wish to destroy whatever fond memories you may have of your Mutter, Fräulein Sterling. I only wish to protect the fragile health of my patient. Your Grossvater and I have been business partners since before the war; did you know that?” He gave a benevolent half smile. “That must seem like a very long time to you.”

“My lifetime.”
But my lifetime is shrouded in confusion, in absolute mystery. What did Mama’s relationship
 
—or lack of relationship
 
—with this fanatical group have to do with her running away? And, who is my real father? Did she become pregnant
 
—not married, and pregnant? Is that the shame she brought on her family? Am
I
the shame?
But I couldn’t ask Dr. Peterson. It was too personal . . . and too humiliating that I didn’t know.

I took the album with me and pored over its pages for hours, tracing Mama’s and Grandmother’s faces and forms, searching for some link to them, until I heard Frau Winkler turn off the lights in the hallway and
lock her door. The hall clock struck eleven.
Why does she lock her door at night? It’s not like Grandfather’s going to climb the stairs and attack her.

I turned back to the album.
I look so little like you, Mama, or like Grandmother or Grandfather either. Not even Uncle Rudy
 
—at least not much. Only enough to see that I’m related. Did Grandfather know my father? Did you run off with some boy you hardly knew
 
—some political dissident that shamed Grandfather? Was that boy a Nazi or something else?
The possibility that my mother was a Nazi swept over me like flu, and I thought I might vomit.
If my father was a Nazi, what did he do?
But I shouldn’t have to ask. I knew what Nazis did.

LIESELOTTE SOMMER

SEPTEMBER–DECEMBER 1941

I pled chronic trouble with my monthlies until Vater agreed to wait until my sixteenth birthday before parading me before more officers. He said Fräulein Hilde had offered to help him throw me a party the likes of which I’d never seen, never enjoyed. I doubted very much that I would enjoy it at all.

Lukas left for compulsory military training in late September
 
—there was no avoiding it now that he’d turned eighteen. We hoped against hope that his ranking for “essential war work” might even yet keep him from the Wehrmacht. Marta and I did our best to cover the routes he’d developed in delivering food to those in hiding, adding them to our own.

The same month, Jews were forbidden to use public transportation, which complicated everything. How could people get to work? How would they buy food? Helping older members of the Jewish community find food and fuel became a full-time occupation.

I attended the BDM as usual, volunteering whenever possible for projects over the city. I prayed I’d not be reported for not showing up each time. Too often I made the excuse that the bus did not run on schedule, or that my bicycle tire punctured and I couldn’t find a rubber patch in time. Meanwhile, I pedaled furiously through the countryside collecting whatever I could and lied freely when stopped for identity papers. I prayed those on patrol never compared notes. There was no plausible explanation for one schoolgirl having so many sick relatives on the outskirts of Berlin.

My favorite customer was old Frau Bernstein, very much alone since her husband died the year before. Each time I brought her a thermos of Frau Kirchmann’s soup you’d have thought I’d stolen all the crown jewels of Europe and laid them on her doorstep. Long white hair braided into a high bun and smile wrinkles wreathing her cheeks, Frau Bernstein greeted me warmly. Effervescent despite her poverty, she was everything I imagined a Grossmutter to be.

My next stop for her came on a Tuesday afternoon near the end of September. Sunshine dappled between the changing leaves as I pedaled through the streets beside Marta. We kept pace, laughing and joking, until we passed Unter den Linden, then winked and swerved our separate ways. Frau Kirchmann had been given a little bit of sugar, and I carried a thimbleful tightly wrapped in my sewing kit for Frau Bernstein’s tea. She’d clap her hands in surprise, so pleased. I pedaled faster to have extra time to visit with her.

Had I not been so intent on envisioning Frau Bernstein’s pleasure and our happy scene to come, I might have sooner seen the crowd gathered, or the blockade and the black cars at the end of the street. I nearly ran into a curly-haired toddler escaped from his mother’s arms.

“Watch where you’re going, stupid girl!” the mother yelled, scooping him into the air. “You could have killed him!
Dummkopf!
”

“Bitte,”
I pled, thankful the screaming child was only frightened. “What’s going on?” I pulled my bike to the side of the road, edging the onlookers.

A girl not much older than me jostled through the crowd, stretching
her neck to see beyond the shoulders in front of her. “Who did they take? Who’s going now?”

“What is it?” I said again.

“Don’t you know? It’s the rehousing,” she whispered. “Transporting those Jews to settlement houses. Everybody’s been waiting, wondering when they’d be taken. It will be a rush for the best things
 
—wait and see.”

“They won’t take them all, will they? The old
 
—they’ll leave them?”

“A clean sweep of the block is what we’ve heard. They’re supposed to catalog everything
 
—take it all for the Reich. But you know they can’t do it all at once. Everybody’s hoping for a chance to go through. Some of those Jews have gold hidden beneath their floorboards. They just pretend to be poor, you know. Hoarders
 
—it’s bad for the war effort. Well, this will be the end of that.”

I strained my neck, my eyes, but could barely see beyond the crowd pressed to the blockade. A car horn blared from behind, an official car with swastika flags flying. I pulled my bike onto the curb, ducking my head. The crowd parted and the driver pushed through. I lifted my eyes just in time to catch the profile of a man against the back window
 
—
Dr. Peterson, surely!

Brownshirts patrolling the blockade shouted for the crowd to disperse as groups of people were pushed and dragged from their houses. Two shots fired into the air told us they meant business. People fell back upon people.

Please,
I prayed, not Frau Bernstein.
Let them leave her. Let her hide. Let me take care of her.

The crowd had not complied with the order, at least not quickly enough to please those in charge. Gasps and cries rose from the front of the crowd as brownshirts pushed them, roughing them up. I pulled my bicycle back and turned the wheel as quickly as I could. I didn’t want to go. I wanted to see Frau Bernstein one last time, to give her sugar and soup. I wanted to pull her aside, reassure her that she could stay, that I would come in two days and help her find a new place to live and hide. That everything would remain the same between us. But I couldn’t risk being seen by Dr. Peterson, couldn’t risk having my bicycle confiscated, couldn’t risk identification by begging for the life and freedom of one old Jewish woman.

The moment I turned the corner I pedaled
 
—faster and faster
 
—to the Kirchmanns, abandoning the rest of my route and my supposed identity, tears of fear and frustration, of futility, streaming down my face, sure there were Gestapo at my heels. I broke every courier’s rule so carefully planned and rehearsed. Fear is a formidable enemy, as real as the foe that openly threatens.

I threw my bike against the wall and burst into the Kirchmanns’ kitchen.

“Lieselotte! What in the world?” Frau Kirchmann needn’t have pulled me into her arms; I nearly bowled her over. “What is it? What’s happened? Where is Marta?”

“Frau Bernstein
 
—they’re emptying her street. Rehousing
 
—I don’t know where.” I blubbered and blubbered, not even sure she’d understand me.

“It’s started, then.” She held me close. “We’ve heard rumors.”

“You knew? You knew they would take her away? Why didn’t you tell me?” I all but screamed.

“Calm yourself, be quiet! They’ll hear you in the street.”

I moaned, swallowing my grief, still crying
 
—afraid for dear Frau Bernstein, ashamed of the terrible fear for myself.

“We’ll find out if she’s taken
 
—where she’s taken. We won’t abandon her, not if we can help it. Did you see her go?”

“
Nein, nein.
I couldn’t see anything. The girl beside me said there would be a ‘clean sweep’ of the block
 
—even the elderly.”

“Those who cannot work do not eat,” Frau Kirchmann mumbled.

“What?”

“That’s our New Germany’s view of the elderly
 
—Jewish or not, but Jewish most of all.” Frau Kirchmann sat down at the kitchen table now and put her head in her hands.

I’d thought only of my own grief, my pain for Frau Bernstein. But there were so many more in our network. I’d suppered with the Kirchmanns often enough to know they ate little of the huge pots of soup Frau Kirchmann made, delivered enough jars and thermoses of
soup to be aware. So many friends, so many dear ones, so many strangers. Where were they headed now?

In this topsy-turvy world, things changed daily. Within days every German Jewish person was required to wear a yellow star
 
—pointing them out as objects for ridicule and harassment on the street by day, prohibited from every advantage of citizenry at a glance, and making them subjects of persecution by night.

I’d believed the worst that could happen to Frau Bernstein was that she’d be sent to the Jew House in Berlin. But I was wrong. In late October, she and the Jews from her street were deported
 
—to Poland, as essential workers, promised better food and housing. I did not believe this. Frau Bernstein could barely walk with her arthritic and swollen legs. What work could they send her to do? If she was not worthy of public transportation or medical assistance or adequate rations in Berlin, what would make her deserving of these things in defeated Poland?

I had just turned sixteen, and I was not stupid. I worked and prayed with the Kirchmanns. At least, I worked. Sometimes I prayed, though I doubted my prayers were heard.

By day I participated in school and BDM meetings, and heiled Hitler. On Sundays, during church services, I wanted to believe in God, the author of love and mercy. I bowed my head when the pastor prayed. But outside, in the dead of night or on my bicycle runs into the countryside, even though I prayed then too, I believed nothing and no one. I trusted no one.

Deportations stepped up in November. I couldn’t count the cattle cars or the hundreds of Jews that left from the stockyard. I don’t know where they went, only that they never came back, that no one expected them to come back. Their property, too, was confiscated for the Reich and “Aryanized.”

Yellow stars, which had bloomed across Berlin overnight, now shrank as the weeks passed. Jews, who’d believed things would surely calm down, surely work out, now sold everything to obtain passports, to have their names added to lists for admission to countries anywhere outside German rule.

Most could not afford that luxury. Every day, more went into hiding. We could not feed the ones we knew, and that felt like murder. I longed for the nights I used to lie awake, waiting for Rudy or Vater to come in. I counted myself lucky if I made it through the kitchen window, legs muddied and scraped from cycling madly, before Vater stumbled through the front door in his drunken stupor.

I could not understand Vater. Fräulein Hilde kept him dangling, like a fish lured by luscious bait. One moment he appeared a broken old man, lamenting that she tormented him by demanding that he establish himself first, only to declare the next that the hunt was on, that her teasing energized him, as though he’d all the passion of a seventeen-year-old boy in love. He kept away long hours, saying his business had increased thanks to new connections. He authorized builders to modernize and improve our house, and told me to keep out of their way and let them work in peace. All I cared was that he and Fräulein Hilde both seemed to have completely forgotten me and birthday parties and Nazi officers.

I didn’t realize I should have kept closer watch, that I should not have been so naive.

The announcement crackled through the parlor radio. Germany declared war on the United States, days after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor
 
—some Pacific port of the Americans. I’d no idea what this meant for the weeks ahead, except that the Kirchmanns believed it would draw the war out longer, and that Japan and Germany had foolishly raised a sleeping dragon
 
—an opinion no one dared utter in public. One more worry to add to those that abounded.

Perhaps it wasn’t right or reasonable, but I pushed those worries aside as best I could and pinned my hopes on Lukas coming home before Christmas. Home to his family, home to me. Would he have changed in these three long months?

Herr Kirchmann received reaffirmation that Lukas’s work was essential to the war effort.
He won’t be going to the front! Thank You, God!