My Family for the War Read online

  In fact, the room I found myself in appeared to be not only the kitchen, but also the bedroom and living room for the entire family. The cooking area, the table with a bench and chairs, and a large cupboard took up almost the entire space, but there was still a stack of several mattresses against the wall.

  Ruben’s little sister shyly brought me some fruit. “My name is Chaja,” she whispered, and took two steps backward, gazing at me steadily in astonishment.

  “Hello, Chaja,” I murmured, and closed my eyes, the apple held in my hand.

  It grew quiet. A few ugly pictures still flashed through my memory. I tried to remember the early part of the morning, when I had woken up and still had no idea what this day would bring me. That wasn’t so long ago.

  I pulled off the wet cloth that covered my entire face and found Ruben, who had made himself comfortable on one of the chairs. “Leave it on,” he said. “You look pretty rough. But Richard Graditz does too, if that’s any consolation. I think his nose is broken.”

  On his way home, he had literally run right into the three boys who came shooting out of the entryway without looking left or right. Other than the typical “Bug off, Jew boy!” they didn’t bother him, but to be on the safe side he had still waited a few minutes before he peeked around the corner into the courtyard.

  I told him what had happened. Since my swollen lip had already gone down some, I even embellished the heated chase through the cellar to my advantage a little. The longer I told my story, the more energetic I got. I had escaped. They only caught me because there were three of them. If I had been with Bekka, the story would have ended entirely differently!

  “You are completely crazy, Ziska,” Ruben announced, as if I had spoken my last thought out loud. “You can’t win against them. What if Richard’s nose is really broken? What if his parents file a complaint against you?”

  “They won’t do that. I know them. The most they’ll do is give him another good slap for beating up a girl. Richard is much worse than his parents.”

  “May he find a horrible end,” Ruben answered ceremoniously.

  Half curious and half shy, I looked at him. Ruben sometimes said things that I didn’t know how to answer. He was the only one in his family they sent to school, probably because he was so clever, they couldn’t stand having him at home all the time.

  “What language is that your parents speak?” I wanted to know. “Is it Dutch? Are you all going to Holland? Last week we put in our application to go to Shanghai! But we haven’t even started learning Chinese yet.”

  Ruben shook his head in disbelief. “You must have heard Yiddish before.”

  “Yiddish?” I repeated. “Where would I have heard that? No one in my family knows Yiddish.”

  “But that’s our language, Ziska, it has been for hundreds of years. Your ancestors definitely used to speak Yiddish too.”

  “How would you know that?”

  “Yiddish is a mixture of Hebrew and old German. It’s a language Jewish people all over Europe use to communicate.”

  “Is that true? Then they didn’t have to learn English or something like that?”

  I was fascinated. Ruben looked at me with compassion. “You’re being persecuted and you don’t even know who you are,” he said.

  I was about to argue, but Ruben looked genuinely sad at the moment, as if he felt sorry for me. “And? Who are you?” I asked him with a bit of a challenge in my voice.

  He smiled. “I was born here, but my family comes from eastern Poland. My mother is Beile, my father is Jakob. My father’s father was Herschel and his wife Zeitel…”

  Ruben told me much more that afternoon while I lay on the bench in the kitchen and waited for my mother to pick me up. He told me about traders who carried heavy handcarts hundreds of miles through the countryside before returning to their families on Fridays to celebrate the Sabbath. About the Black Death, which the Jews were accused of causing. There were smaller attacks and larger massacres.

  “They’ve been murdering us for hundreds of years in Poland,” Ruben said. “We came back to Germany when things got better here. Jews from the east don’t live particularly well here, but they can get by. Our ancestor who crossed the Elbe River was named Trachim, his wife was Didle. They had one daughter, Shanda, and she married Gerschom…”

  I didn’t hear the ticking of the clock on the wall anymore, I forgot all about my injuries, and I forgot mean, insignificant little Richard Graditz. Each of the names that Ruben recited etched itself deeply in my memory in place of all that. Because I was the one Ruben told his story to.

  Not even four weeks later I stood in the Seydenstickers’ apartment and there was no one there.

  “They’re all gone,” Bekka whispered, trying to pull me out of the apartment by the arm. “They picked up the Polish people, I told you already. The Polish government revoked Polish citizenship from anyone who has lived outside the country for more than five years, and the Germans don’t want them either. They immediately rounded them all up and took them over the border that same night. Ziska, what are you doing?” she asked nervously. “Let’s get out of here! I don’t think we’re allowed to be here, even if the door wasn’t locked!”

  But in the end she did help me to stack the mattresses against the wall, throw away the leftover food still on the plates, clear the dishes from the table, so obviously left in a rush, and wash them. The Seydenstickers used different plates and silverware to keep milk and meat separate from each other. They were marked with different colors, and we were very careful to put everything back in the right places.

  They never returned, but I think Ruben would have been glad.

  Chapter 3

  Ziska’s Flight

  The Seydenstickers and all the other families who lived in their building disappeared without a trace. I was aware of my father’s fears about the future, and familiar with my parents’ endless discussions—they were always about our “survival.” I had been beaten and had lost friends. But nothing compared to the shock and helplessness I felt when we pulled the door to the Seydenstickers’ apartment closed behind us and stepped onto a street where life went on as usual, as if nothing had happened. Cars honked, horses pulled carts past us, and women carried heavy shopping bags and pushed baby carriages. The baker set a big tray of cake in his display window. I breathed in as deeply as I possibly could, just to feel that I was still there.

  At the same time, it was the first experience that I couldn’t talk about with my parents, which made me feel even more scared and alone.

  Maybe I should have just tried. Maybe Mamu was already sorry about the way she had reacted to my encounter with the Seydenstickers. The rage and accusations she started piling on me in the car struck as if she were beating me with a club.

  “Are you crazy, Ziska? Those people and their kind are the reason everyone is always saying ‘dirty Jews’! They’re the ones who pulled us into this mess with their black coats and their beards! How can you make me go in there?”

  My mouth hung open. It was supposed to be the Seydenstickers’ fault that we had to be afraid of the Germans? I had only known the family for a few hours, but Mamu’s accusations seemed incomprehensible to me, entirely—shockingly—false and unfair. That explained why Mamu had hardly thanked them and hadn’t even responded when Mrs. Seydensticker invited us to come Friday night for Shabbat.

  “Papa!” I wailed upstairs in the apartment, flinging myself around his neck.

  “Ziska, for heaven’s sake!” he spluttered.

  My mother was completely beside herself. She stormed into the bathroom and turned on the water, then came running back and started to tear the clothes off my body. I screeched at full volume.

  “Margot, what are you doing?” Papa called, and tried to push her back. “The child needs to see a doctor!”

  “Not before I’ve scrubbed all the filth off of her! Fleas and lice, most likely! Do you know where I picked her up? Tell him, Ziska!”

  “At Ruben Seyden
sticker’s,” I sobbed. “Richard beat me up and Ruben helped me.”

  “You should have seen it.” Mamu tried to reach past my wildly flailing hands. “Eight people in one room, chickens on the steps, and my Ziska on the floor holding a stark-naked baby! If I ever catch you over there again!”

  Something in my head exploded. “You are so mean! You, you sound like the Germans!” I hurled back at her defiantly.

  Mamu staggered back a step. Her enraged face twisted as if she would cry, then she wound up and struck me across the face with the full force of her rage. Then she ran into the bedroom and slammed the door shut behind her.

  “They’re Jewish, like us,” I said to Papa, trembling. I hadn’t even felt the blow, but when I thought of the look on Mamu’s face it made me go cold.

  “You’re right,” Papa answered thoughtfully. “From the Germans’ perspective there’s no difference. For us, there are this kind and that kind. Don’t you think that people should adapt just a little to the customs of the country where they’ve chosen to live? That people shouldn’t constantly point out that they’re different?”

  “I think we should stick together,” I murmured.

  Papa sighed. “It’s hard to explain,” he admitted. “Why don’t you go put on something clean before we take you to the doctor?”

  My scratches and scrapes healed quickly, but the split inside of me went deeper. Although we often fought, my mother was the authority figure in my life: big, strong, proud, a lighthouse that Papa and I looked to for guidance. I knew that Mamu made mistakes, and that didn’t diminish my admiration of her. It was a new idea to me that she was fallible in a larger context, and it hurt, even more so when she never said a single word about our fight, although she must have noticed how upset I was. My mother waited for me to make the first move. And I was too confused by what had happened to find the right words.

  The time when we could have talked about it passed. My world as I had known it fell apart in more ways at the end of the year. There was even something wrong with Bekka, my best friend. She didn’t speak English with me anymore. She didn’t even want to take the Survival Plan out of her shoe. I only tried a few times to talk with her about all the things going through my head since my encounter with the Seydenstickers and Mamu’s violent reaction to it.

  “What does Jewish really mean?” I asked. “In the Bible the Jews are a people, but that’s much too long ago. For thousands of years they haven’t even had their own country.”

  “That doesn’t have anything to do with it. Judaism is a religion,” Bekka responded cantankerously.

  “But we’re Protestant. You can’t have two religions at the same time!” I protested.

  “Well, it’s a race too,” Bekka muttered.

  “It is not. A race, that’s silly! You’re blonder than any of the Aryan girls I know. So it can’t be a race.”

  “Ziska, I have to go home now.”

  She crawled out of our cave on her hands and knees. “What’s the matter, Bekka? Stay here! What’s wrong?” I called after her.

  I sat there for a while with my arms wrapped around my knees. The fall chill in the air wasn’t the only thing that made me feel cold.

  I don’t know if my parents knew about the Seydenstickers’ disappearance. I couldn’t drum up enough courage to ask them. October drew to a close with that crushing blow. November started out chilly and rainy, and compared to everything that had silently changed for me, it was a remarkably normal time. The foliage that covered our hiding place in the cemetery fell from the trees and was swept away.

  My father still put on his hat every morning, slipped a sandwich into his briefcase, and set off for the office, even though he didn’t call himself a lawyer anymore, but a consultant, and he only worked with Jewish clients now. The majority of them came to him in desparate situations: emigration petitions that were denied or simply not answered at all, evictions from their apartments without cause, confiscation of their businesses. “Dejudaization,” it was called. My father listened to everything, promised to do his best for them, and less and less often tried to reassure them with the phrase “Better times are ahead.”

  On that evening, a Wednesday, a strange tension filled the air. The embassy secretary in Paris had died following an assassination attempt two days earlier—shot by a seventeen-year-old, who let himself be apprehended, according to witnesses’ reports, after he called out, “In the name of the persecuted Jews!” My parents were anxious and glued to the radio. I went to bed early, wrapped up in my own worries. Mamu and I still only talked to each other when absolutely necessary.

  It could have been a bad dream. That’s what I still thought as I slowly glided from sleep back into waking. Banging, heavy steps of boots, loud voices. It was dark all around me. I would just drink a sip of water, turn over in my bed, and fall back asleep.

  I reached for the glass of water on the nightstand when suddenly light fell through the crack under my bedroom door. A racket followed, a crashing and smashing that struck me like white-hot lightning. I knew immediately that someone had kicked in the door to our apartment.

  “DOES THE JEW MANGOLD LIVE HERE?”

  I felt my lips on the glass of water, my arm, heavy as lead, holding it, and the liquid running along my chin into the collar of my pajamas. I couldn’t swallow.

  Another voice answered, calm and quiet. “Who wants to know?”

  “HE HAS A SMART MOUTH, THE JEW!”

  Again the quiet voice, followed by more smashing and the sound of shattering glass. Papa! The glass fell out of my hand, water flowed over my banket and pajamas. I couldn’t think, but I kicked the blankets onto the floor, jumped out of bed, and flew to the door. Papapapapapa! My legs wanted to give out. I turned the door handle with stiff fingers. I heard my fast, shallow breathing.

  My father stood with his back toward me. He was wearing his bathrobe and I saw his snow-white feet in slippers.

  “HOW ABOUT A BOW BEFORE A GERMAN OFFICER?”

  These brutes were no officers, even I could see that. They were just common Nazis in their crap-brown uniforms, but after hesitating briefly, my father must have decided it was all the same. He took position and saluted.

  “PUT THAT HAND DOWN, JEW! YOU PIG, YOU’RE NO SOLDIER! I SAID BOW!”

  “My husband is an officer and fought in the World War. He was awarded the Iron Cross,” sounded my mother’s voice. There was just a hint of a tremor in it. Only then did I see Mamu, standing in the doorway to their bedroom in her nightgown, flanked by two men holding clubs.

  “SHUT UP, BITCH! WHO ASKED YOU?”

  My father rocked lightly onto the tip of his toes, then quickly, stiffly, let his upper body bend forward.

  “DEEPER, YOU PIG. DO I HAVE TO SHOW YOU WHAT A PROPER BOW LOOKS LIKE?”

  The Nazi responsible for the shouting took a step toward Papa, brutally shoved him down toward the floor, and at the same time rammed his knee into Papa’s face. There was a sound like when someone steps on a rotten board. Papa bent over forward and sank to the ground silently, pressing a hand to his mouth. Blood dripped through his fingers.

  “GET UP! COME WITH US!”

  “No, please! Franz! Franz!”

  Mamu darted toward Papa with a step or two, but she didn’t get any farther. One of the two men who stood next to her held her arm tight and twisted it backward, so hard that she screamed, and threw her against the doorframe.

  A gasp escaped from my throat, nothing more. No one could possibly have heard it. But with the heightened alertness of a bloodhound, the man who had hurt Papa lifted his head and our eyes met across the length of the foyer.

  “Ah,” he said, suddenly very quiet, “you have a little one!”

  I stumbled backward, back into my room.

  Close the door, close it, shut it, why don’t I have a key, why won’t Mamu let me have a key, he’s coming through the door, he’s coming, why isn’t he coming, what can I put in front of it, there isn’t anything, I can’t look at him a
gain, please, no!

  Cold night air surrounded me. I crouched on the windowsill. Bekka’s voice went through my head: “The tree is closer than it looks! I didn’t need that much momentum!” I didn’t have her courage, I wouldn’t make it, I’m about to die, but it’s better than looking into those eyes again.

  I jumped and didn’t feel the impact, didn’t hear how branches cracked and limbs broke under my fingers. My bare feet were like claws that dug into the trunk and climbed up. Up, not down. How did I know to do that? When the wolf looked out the window, I was six feet above him, above him and the light that shone out of my room onto the tree. He leaned far out over the windowsill and peered into the dark courtyard, then shook his head slowly, as if with regret, and closed the window. He even pulled the curtains shut.

  Outside. Cold, moist air. Somewhere there was a voice calling, laughing, a clatter. Above the roofs in the direction of the city the sky glowed red and gold, lit up and pulsating like a dragon on the loose. The trunk of the birch tree was thin and supple up there, and it gently rocked me. I would never climb down.

  The motion behind the curtain was so subtle that I almost missed it. I lifted my face, which I had pressed against the tree trunk, and with a fresh wave of terror stared through the branches at the little white figure in the fourth-story window. There was no question that she had seen me in my hideout. In my light pajamas I was crouched less than six feet away from her.

  As soon as I recognized Christine I took off down the tree, fleeing. I didn’t stop for a second, even though it felt like my bare feet would split open with every step in the branches; even though I was moving farther and farther away from my parents with each move. I didn’t know what had happened in our apartment in the meantime, but as long as I sat in the tree next to my room, I at least felt like I was close to them. I reached the ground and knew I was the only one left.

  It was unbearable. My first impulse was to run right back up the stairs, and to give myself up to them. You can do what you want with me, but let me be with my parents!