The Prosperous Thief (10 page)
O
ver in Paris, Ernst vom Rath died that afternoon. Not that the authorities would have been surprised, as one of the bullets had ripped clean through his spleen, pancreas and stomach. A mere forty-eight hours separating wounding and death, but for an efficient people like the Germans who had already recorded the habits and whereabouts of every Jew in Germany and Austria, it was time enough to ensure a neat spontaneous outbreak of violence.
Kristallnacht
, such a pretty word: Crystalnight. Not Firenight. Not Deathnight. Not Truthnight.
But Crystalnight. Death and destruction dressed up for the ball.
When vom Rath’s death became public, the Lewins were travelling back to Krefeld, and by the time they arrived home, Amalie Friedman was full of the news. There had been sporadic violence against Jews since Grynszpan’s attack on Monday but now there was talk of serious and widespread reprisals. The reports on the wireless howled with shock and righteous anger; if this vom Rath had been Hitler himself it would be hard to imagine greater outrage. The Lewins began their cold supper with the wireless bleating in the background. But soon Renate was on her feet – such threats couldn’t possibly be good for the digestion, she said – and turned the machine off with force enough to dislodge the knob.
They finished their meal in silence, and afterwards engaged in a flurry of activity as if that might ward off danger. But Martin’s reading, Alice’s puzzle, Amalie’s crocheting and Renate’s sketching neither filled time nor dampened their fears. As the night deepened, there was a tautness in the air and a rustling behind doors. It was felt in Düsseldorf as a background distraction, but in Krefeld it was an eerie threat, like living in the shadow of a smoking volcano.
Most Jews in this region of Germany chose to live in the large, established communities of Düsseldorf, Cologne and Bonn, so there were only a few Jewish families in Krefeld, none of whom lived close to the Lewins. Two families, rebounding on rumours, had packed their bags and bolted west. They had business connections in Arnhem, and while they knew it would be risky at the border, hoped their Dutch colleagues would vouch for them. Martin thought it doubtful anyone would protect a handful of German-Jewish business acquaintances who were no longer in business, but kept his thoughts to himself. After all, when comparing the unknown risks of staying with the equally unknown risks of leaving, logic was no more reliable than hope and provided a good deal less comfort.Two families decided on flight and a reliance on strangers, while the remaining Krefeld Jews shut themselves in their homes with their wirelesses and telephones and waited.
‘How much revenge does this vom Rath warrant?’ Martin said. ‘How many Jews can possibly be punished?’
He had left the table and was pacing the lounge from window to table and back again. He surged through the room, his overcoat flapping, his pipe jammed in the corner of his mouth. Back and forth he went, his tread heavy on the floor, and only when his coat clipped Renate’s easel, almost toppling it, did he realise the danger. The dull regular pounding of his shoes and the Fischers downstairs, and so little required these days to awaken the suspicions of good Germans. He stopped and dangled in the middle of the room, at a loss to know what to do.
‘Ring Erich,’ Renate said.‘He’ll have the latest news.’
Erich Friedman, Renate’s brother in Berlin, had an ear so attuned to current affairs that he had once been depicted in a cartoon in the Jewish press as a human strain of telephone exchange. Over the past few years he had managed more than most Jews to maintain friends in high German places, good contacts with good information. Although not yielding much tonight as Martin discovered when he was finally connected. Yes, Erich had heard there would be violence, but more than that he could not say. Though it didn’t take a genius or a Jew to guess Hitler would use the vom Rath death as yet another springboard to put the Jews in their place.
‘You should rethink your visa applications,’Erich said to Martin.
‘Your preference might be for America or England, but you may find that Argentina or Shanghai prefer you.’And just before hanging up.‘Stay at home tonight. Make yourselves invisible.’
How useless and defenceless one feels when waiting for certain but unspecified disaster. The criminal condemned to die knows what to expect and knowing can make certain choices: to go quietly or not; to conceal his emotions or not; to hang himself beforehand or not. But waiting for an unknown disaster is to be tortured by an imagination attuned to the worst. The best one can do in such a situation is toy with possibilities. So if the apartment were stormed Martin would deal with the intruders while Renate, Alice and Amalie would flee. And should there be fire, they would escape via the bedroom window, not because the fire-escape was close by but because the courtyard was poorly illuminated. And if Martin were summoned –
‘A dog receives better!’
Renate rose so suddenly her chair fell to the floor. She’d had enough. She hated what was happening and she hated the Germans. But most of all she hated being Jewish: it had never done anything for her and now she was being persecuted for it. She grabbed their knapsacks from the sideboard, hurled them to the table and started to fill them. It was incomprehensible what was happening. Threat after threat, and incumbent on her, on Martin, on all the other Jews to shuffle the various dangers in order to determine what posed the greatest threat at any particular time. Would it be the Nazis at the door? Would it be the neighbours downstairs? Would it be the thugs in the street? What would be the major threat in the next five minutes? What in an hour’s time? So much threat, and all directed at them, at Jews, a people for whom violence extended no further than tossing a few words around.
She yanked the straps of each of the knapsacks and carried them into the kitchen. Nazis on a rampage would rip into sideboards and credenzas, display cabinets and dressing-tables, they’d rip into upholstery and bedding, they’d rip into you, but the party fed them well so Jewish food held no interest. She tossed the bags in the bottom of the pantry, shoved them right to the back behind her largest jars of pickles, and slammed the door. The sound sheered through the still, grey room, and Renate, like Martin a while earlier, suddenly recalled the Fischers downstairs. She stood motionless in the kitchen, wrapped in the noise of her own bitter breathing. Anger, loss, betrayal, even fear, all were indulgences to be rationed in these contemptuous times; she felt bleak, chilled and empty: the emergency bags were packed and there was nothing left to do.
And finally she acknowledged things would not improve, not today, nor tomorrow, nor in the foreseeable future. Oddly, this knowledge so assiduously avoided afforded her some relief, for when you accepted the worst, anything less meant not only were you ahead but you knew you would cope.
Besides, there were others to consider. Her poor mother would sit for hours rigid in her corsets, her tightly waved hair framing a face set in stone. If you were to detonate that face, what an eruption of grief and disbelief would spill. Amalie Friedman, always so proud of being German, had a whole history to lose – had lost most of it already. Then there was Alice, her only child, whose past was thinner than a fingernail and whose future was day by day more fragile.
Renate collected herself and returned to the living room. She sat in one armchair and Martin in another, both of them to wait out the long night. Amalie withdrew to her piano and brief improvisations in memory and hope before going to bed, while Alice slept fitfully on the couch. As the hours passed, Renate waited with Martin in a far from comfortable silence, for it was largely her fault they found themselves in this situation. Not that Martin would ever blame her, but the facts were clear. As early as 1935, before he had been forced to give up the business, Martin had wanted to emigrate. But Renate truly believed there was time enough for such radical decisions, and a year later, with the brief spring surrounding the Berlin Olympics, she comforted herself on a decision well delayed. The remission was cruelly brief. The Olympic flame was hardly extinguished, and the voices of foreigners still fresh in memory, when the persecution returned more punishing than ever; the violence and humiliation too. But despite the increasing dangers, she still did not want to leave. Even when she saw how sublimely sensitive were the Germans when it came to humiliating Jews, how great their talent for Jewish vulnerability, she believed they could remain in Krefeld and still be safe.
‘We’re German,’ Renate would say. ‘What is there for a German in Palestine or America or God forbid Australia? If we were to settle in those places, settle properly and forever, we’ d have to stop being German.’
‘But we can’t be German here,’ Martin would say. And more quietly,‘Who would want to?’
Now as she sits waiting for disaster during the long night of the ninth of November, Renate sees the future with bruising clarity and knows she would go anywhere.
‘Even Shanghai? Even China?’ asks Martin, naming the only place in the world without a Jewish quota.
And Renate recalls the joke, worn thin after its marathon through German-Jewish circles, about Oskar Landau in China on Rosh Hashanah and wanting to attend synagogue. All around are temples and shrines and Chinese people going about their business. Finally Oskar stops a man dressed in traditional silk jacket and cane hat, a plait trailing down his back, and asks if there is a synagogue anywhere in the city. To his surprise he learns there is. ‘But what do
you
want with a synagogue?’ the Chinese man asks. Oskar explains he is Jewish, that today is the Jewish new year.‘Of course, of course. What Jew doesn’t know it is Rosh Hashanah,’ the Chinese man says. ‘It’s just you don’t look Jewish.’
And of course, of course, Renate says to Martin, if Shanghai is their best option – their only option, Martin now says – then they’ll go to Shanghai. So they sit in the shade of night, wrapped in overcoats and regret, Martin planning the various steps to take them from Krefeld in Germany to Shanghai in China, Renate trying to determine if it is possible when all hope is gone to exist under the raised fist of persecution. Alice sleeps on a couch nearby, her whole life in front of her should she ever have the chance, and in her bedroom, Amalie Friedman, elegant even in nightclothes, is lying in bed waiting for the pain in her chest to subside so she can slip into dreams of the past.
When the fires begin late on the night of the ninth of November, the clouds over the Jewish districts of Germany and Austria are sheathed in reds and pinks. The next day, dawn comes late to Jews. The sun is a perfect burnished disc in an evenly charred sky and a smell of burning gorges on the ruins. No secret network is required to spread the news, no clandestine telephone calls nor underground telegraph, for German radio and newspapers are proud to report the spontaneous uprisings across Germany and Austria as good Germans vent their anger over vom Rath’s death. Synagogues, schools, community centres, Jewish hospitals, kindergartens, all of them described as sites of anti-German ferment, have been plundered and torched. The few Jewish shops and businesses to have survived the onslaughts of recent years are now destroyed. Jewish homes are stormed and wrecked, and Jews themselves have been beaten, tortured and dragged off to concentration camps.
Around dawn on Thursday morning, Martin, Renate and Alice Lewin are gathered at their dining table. Alice has finished breakfast, the others could not eat. They sit in silence while the wireless intones triumph after German triumph and they hear loss after loss. City by city, town by town, a litany of destruction. And such delight taken in burning the Jewish books of prayer and learning. The way the paper burns, differently according to the German press than Christian scriptures, and the Hebrew script described as if the letters themselves harbour sinister intent. Five thousand years of learning is now nothing more than a Jewish plot to take over Germany. The people of the book are going up in smoke and the most civilised people in the world are fanning the flames.
The beating of boots on a wooden stair is terrifying when you know they’re coming for you. Slowly, firmly, closer, louder, a relentless beat in perfect unison, at least two men, possibly more, closer, louder, and coming for you. Through the street door, up the first stairs, their tight-throated voices barking and laughing; no need for silence, no need for surprise when there’s no escape and everyone realises it. Then a splinter of silence that digs deep in your body, and you try to breathe but the air has gone, and the pounding in your gut is tearing you open, a moment of silence but it feels like forever. A fist to the door on the flat below, a fist thudding hard till the door is opened. And you breathe again, they’re not here for you. But of course for you, who else would they want? Herr Fischer receives a blast from Bavaria: it’s Lewin they want, which flat is Lewin’s? Asks not for the answer, they know where Lewin is, but as a warning to anyone who might help a Jew.
Upstairs Martin and Renate stand close and frozen. They’ve planned numerous escape routes, but when the boots are on the stairs, all plans are useless.Alice is alert and watching, they reach her together, but with one of them needing to confront the thugs, it is Renate who lifts the child and holds her tight.
The boots start again. They’re on the stairs. They’re on the landing. They’re outside the door. Three crisp knocks. Martin slips the bolt. The door whips open. Three men burst in. Martin is hurled to the floor. They lift him up, they slam him to the table. Crash goes his head against the mahogany. Crash go their fists into his sweet earnest face.
‘What do you want?’ Renate is shouting.‘We’ll give you what you want.’
They laugh at her, they’ll take what they want. They’ve been working for hours, they know exactly what they want. Alice is softly crying. Renate covers the child’s eyes while cupboards are emptied, crockery is hurled against walls, jewellery pocketed, books torn apart, chairs thrown through windows, quilts and pillows slit open. And now the men turn, they turn on Renate, they advance towards her with their filthy taunts. She shoves her daughter behind the sofa, shouts at her to stay still. The men approach, they’re peeling off their gloves, such white hands, such slender fingers, reaching towards Renate, about to grab.