My Family for the War Page 4

  But then something odd happened. It was as if I were suddenly two different people. The new Ziska moved quickly through the courtyard in a crouch, checked the exit through the front entryway, saw the small crowd of people and cars on the street, and scurried back to climb over the wall to the yard behind the neighboring building. She dragged one of the garbage cans out of its place, slipped into the little niche behind it, crept along behind the garbage cans into the farthest corner of the enclosure, and huddled against the wall.

  After a while there were no sounds at all coming from the street directly in front of our building. Way off in the distance I thought I could still hear a dull roar, maybe from the fire I had seen in the sky. Was it really a fire? Shouldn’t there have been sirens?

  Tears tumbled from my eyes. I was just a ridiculous girl in her pajamas, crouched behind garbage cans, who had abandoned her parents. A coward who had run away to save her own skin.

  Sobbing, I wrapped both arms around my knees and buried my face in them. Why did I have to be Jewish? It wasn’t fair! I hated it! It would have been better never to have been born in the first place!

  “Ziska? Ziska, are you in there?”

  I startled. A shadow appeared in the gap behind the garbage cans. At first I saw the schoolbag that was pushed forward, then—on all fours—a familiar figure. “I have to go right away so no one notices! Here, wait…”

  Christine reached into her backpack and pulled out a pair of shoes and her lunchbox. Anxiously, she shoved both of them toward me. Finally, she took off her coat and laid it on the ground in front of me. She was wearing a second one underneath it. Only then did I understand that she was trying to help me.

  “Where are my parents?” I whispered.

  “I don’t know. They took your father away. Your mother might still be in the apartment,” Christine said in an unconvincing tone.

  “Could you look?” I spluttered.

  Christine pulled back a little. “I don’t dare, but I’ll bring you something to eat and a blanket as soon as I get home from school!”

  She crept backward, gave me an encouraging smile, and then disappeared. I reached for the shoes and pulled them onto my feet, which were blue from the cold. I put on the coat. It took a while before it warmed my chilled body. In the lunchbox were two sandwiches and an apple. I devoured everything. I was alive.

  I must have held out until about noon in my hiding place. Once someone came and brought out trash. He or she didn’t discover me, but the horrifying image of one container after the other being pulled out of the enclosure while I scurried along the back wall like a cornered rat ran through my mind.

  The longer I thought about it, the greater my panic became. Finally I couldn’t stand it any longer. I pulled Christine’s coat tighter around my shoulders and crawled out into the open. I would crawl back over the wall, slip into our building, and find out if Mamu was in our apartment!

  But as soon as I was outside I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it. My knees trembled, though I couldn’t say if it was from fear or the result of crouching motionless for hours in the cold. I would have to go through the building out to the street and enter our building from there. Hopefully no one would notice that I was wearing pajamas under the coat!

  Luckily, the door to our apartment building was open. Christine’s shoes, which were a size too big for me, made more noise than I would have liked on the stairs, but I couldn’t do anything about it.

  And as if I had had a premonition, the door to the apartment on the second floor opened. Frau Bergmann, now, of all times! But instead of harassing me like she usually did, she only opened the door a crack, looked at me as if she was seeing a ghost, and slammed the door shut again! Right then I knew I would find something awful upstairs.

  The last flight I had to hold on to the banister and pull myself up. My view never wavered from the kicked-in apartment door hanging from one of its hinges.

  “Mamu?” I whispered. No answer. Finally I overcame my fear and stretched out my hand to push the door open.

  I stood in the middle of the foyer. The world ceased to exist, there was no sound other than the splintering of the glass shards under my shoes. I moved through our rooms step by step and felt nothing, not even fear. I took in the damage, studied each and every room thoroughly, but this ravished apartment was no longer my home.

  Papa’s office was in chaos: books and papers shredded, the desk overturned, pictures ripped off the walls. The shattered glass cabinet in the living room, Mamu’s priceless porcelain—our means to Shanghai on the floor in a thousand pieces. In my parents’ bedroom, clothes and bedding were scattered everywhere.

  My room. Strange, they hadn’t touched anything here. It must have been enough that I had plunged out of the window—they thought—to my death.

  I backed out again and stood still, in a daze. In the middle of the foyer was a little pool of congealed blood marking the spot where Papa had been beaten. Red drops made a trail, and I followed it to the door of the apartment. Only then did I glance at the wall. Next to the doorpost, at about my eye level, was a bloody handprint, as if Papa had leaned against it there to support himself.

  And that hand on the wall was what abruptly freed me from my frozen state. Papa! Mamu! I dashed back into my room, hurriedly threw on some clothes, and ran out of the apartment.

  On that day, when everything that was certain was lost, I followed my familiar route to school down to Bergstraße. This was Mamu’s preferred shopping area. People in many of the stores here knew her, and someone would surely have seen her. I started at Krämer’s.

  “Hello, Herr Manz, has my mother been here today?”

  “No, Ziska, not yet.”

  “When she comes, will you tell her I’m looking for her?”

  “Of course, Ziska, I’d be happy to!”

  On my way out, I felt the customers looking at me. Was I mistaken, or had someone said “. . . the poor child”?

  My next stop, Schumann’s gourmet shop, wasn’t fifty yards farther along. I could already see from a distance how people were making a wide arc around it, and as I got closer I could see why. The street was full of broken glass. The display window with the Star of David painted on it had been smashed in, and two Nazis stood in the entrance smoking cigarettes. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the Schumanns with broom and dustpan—under the watch of an SA man—cleaning up what the Nazis had destroyed. Broken glasses and bottles lay on the floor and dented tin cans swam in a messy sauce of marmalade, spices, and preserved foods. A small cluster of people had formed in front of the broken display window near the dry goods shop. Women stared at yarn, scissors, and fasteners. The little shop seemed to be intact. Suddenly, one woman made a grab for it, the spell was broken, and there was no holding them back. I saw balls of yarn, buttons, and thimbles flying through the air and heard the clinking and clattering as the rest of the windowpane broke and fell into the display. Hands grabbed over my head as I fought my way through the throng of bodies to the curb. Two boys in Hitler Youth uniforms leaned against a streetlamp and laughed.

  I had already figured out that we weren’t the only Jews who had been raided during the night. Gradually it dawned on me what else that meant: There probably wasn’t a single Jewish shop on Bergstraße that hadn’t been damaged. I definitely wouldn’t find my mother here.

  And then suddenly it came to me: Bekka! The Liebichs! Of course! Where else would my mother look for me, if not with my best friend?

  “Ziska, finally!” She dragged me into the apartment and turned the key in the lock. “Where were you? Your mother is looking everywhere for you!”

  “I’ve been looking for her too!” I wanted to wait until later to tell Bekka that I had spent the entire morning hiding behind garbage cans. “I was on Bergstraße,” I added.

  “Are you crazy? It could start up again any minute! My mother won’t let me go outside at all.” She pulled me into her room. As we sat down on her bed, I discovered that Bekka’s eyes were red f
rom crying. “They’ve gone to Hamburger Straße. To see if they can get the men released.”

  “The men? Your father too?”

  Bekka nodded. “My father and my brother.”

  Bekka’s little room, decorated with Shirley Temple posters, spun in circles. Thomas, Bekka’s fifteen-year-old brother, was the pride of the family, a talented pianist.

  “It was awful,” Bekka whispered. “They had to go with them right away. They weren’t even allowed to get dressed.”

  “Did they beat them up?”

  “No!” Bekka cried, her eyes widened with fear.

  “Ransack your apartment?”

  Bekka just shook her head. “Then you can be glad,” I said.

  “Are you nuts?” She gave me a shove that almost pushed me off the bed.

  “Do you want to trade places?” I flared up.

  I pressed my lips together and stared down at the tips of my shoes. “On Bergstraße there’s broken glass everywhere,” I said after a while.

  “That’s what I heard. And they supposedly burned all the synagogues in the whole city.”

  “What? The synagogues? All of them?” I was outraged. So that was the fire I had seen during the night. “And what’s on Hamburger Straße?”

  “The Gestapo prison. Three of them went together, your mother and mine and Frau Grün. They took clothes with them, and some medal of your father’s.”

  “That didn’t help any last night,” I muttered.

  “Ziska, what are they going to do with us?” Bekka asked fearfully.

  It was the question everyone was asking themselves. But I had never heard anyone dare to speak it out loud. “We have to get out of here,” I said, instead of answering.

  “And go where?” Bekka’s voice sounded tired and hopeless.

  I looked at her with surprise. “But, you’re all going to America!”

  Bekka started to cry again. She shook her head violently. “No, we’re not. I wanted to tell you. Papa’s cousin denied us.”

  “What do you mean, denied you?”

  “Last month. She doesn’t want to have to sponsor all of us. Papa wrote back that she should just bring Thomas and me over, but she doesn’t want to do that either. She wrote that to separate the family was against divine law.”

  Bekka sobbed. I sat there speechless. The Liebichs weren’t going to America, and all their efforts to learn English had been for nothing.

  Then suddenly an idea occurred to me that was so wonderful, I forgot everything else going on around me. “Bekka! Come with us to Shanghai! You don’t need a visa, just the passage for the ship! We could stay together!”

  “Do you think?” Bekka already had the hiccups from crying, but there was a flicker of hope in her eyes.

  “Absolutely! No visa, no sponsors! They don’t have anything against Jews in China,” I assured her excitedly. “Oh, Bekka, just imagine, the two of us in China!”

  “Well, I… I can talk to my parents!”

  Through a veil of tears Bekka could smile again and you could tell she was embarrassed that she had cried in front of me in the first place.

  The women did not come back alone. They had Herr Liebich and Thomas with them, and you could tell by looking at the men what they had been through. The left half of Thomas’s face was red and swollen; he had been slapped over and over again. Herr Liebich held one arm tightly with the other. His forehead was beaded with sweat and his teeth were clenched together. “Broken,” was all he said. With a tremor in her voice, his wife made phone calls to find a doctor who was willing to treat a Jew. Our family doctor, Dr. Fruchtmann, was still locked up on Hamburger Straße, just like my father and Herr Grün.

  I was so happy to see my mother that I almost knocked her down with my hug. It was as if our quarrel had never happened. She wrapped me in her arms. “Ziska, my little Ziskele,” she murmered tenderly into my hair.

  I pressed myself against her, felt the warmth of her skin… and all of a sudden happiness and courage and power I never dreamed I had flooded through me, and the terror of the previous night already began to fade.

  Mamu and I had each other again, we had survived the worst of it, and everything would be okay! If Thomas and Herr Liebich were released after only half a day, then maybe we could pick up my father tomorrow. Considering how many men they had rounded up, we couldn’t expect that they could confirm Papa’s innocence in just a few hours!

  Before my father came home, Mamu and I would have the apartment cleaned up. I would tape together the torn files, sort all his books. He would never notice that anyone had touched them! The furniture that couldn’t be salvaged, we would just throw away. We wouldn’t be able to take much with us to Shanghai anyway.

  We were together, and that was all that mattered. And we would never be separated again, that much was certain.

  Chapter 4

  New Plans

  “Mama!” Evchen screeched, and swept past me and out of the room like a fat, triumphant dwarf. “Ziska’s being mean to me again!”

  I rolled my eyes. When the voices in the living room grew louder, I could parrot their words, I had heard this routine so often in the past few weeks.

  “Margot, if you can’t make sure that your daughter leaves my little one alone, then I’m sorry, but you’ll have to leave!”

  “If you could manage to occupy the little one for a couple of hours so that Ziska could work in that room…”

  “In Evchen and Betti’s room, mind you! I took you in out of sheer generosity, but this is still my apartment, and if Evchen wants to go into her own room, then I wouldn’t think of stopping her!”

  I stuck my fingers into my ears so I wouldn’t have to hear how Mamu and her sister egged each other on. We had been living under the same roof for exactly twenty-nine days. This was probably just what the Nazis had in mind when they took our apartment. One of the cleverer ones probably had the idea: “Let them move in with their relatives. They’ll finish each other off and make less work for us.”

  There was no chance of concentrating on math homework, at any rate. I sighed and took my fingers out of my ears to figure out how far along they were in their argument.

  “I’m not even talking about gratitude anymore! As if you would ever have done anything for me!” my aunt screamed.

  Oh, Jesus, I thought in desperation. It’s not that the apartment is gone, or that Papa is still locked up in Sachsenhausen… Don’t even think about it. The tickets for the ship to Shanghai arrived today. Now they have to let him go. But what have we done to deserve Aunt Ruth?

  The door opened and Mamu came in. She looked distraught and I instantly regretted having fought off Evchen’s assault on my math book. I sat down next to Mamu on the mattress where I slept at night, between the beds of my two younger cousins, and put an arm around her. A few days ago she had been forced to turn in all of her jewelry, which I knew had been a hard blow for her.

  “I’m sorry,” I muttered dejectedly. “I try to control myself, but every time I see Evchen, a switch flips inside me.”

  “I know the feeling.” Mamu rested her head on my shoulder. “Oh, Ziskele. Let’s hang on for just a few more days, then Papa will be with us again and we can get out of here.”

  “Are you totally, completely, a hundred percent sure that you have everything this time?”

  With a furrowed brow she counted on her fingers, “Passports, identification cards, the exit permit, a receipt for the emigration taxes, the tickets for the ship. The last time, they turned me away again because I didn’t know they wanted to see the exit permit and the tickets.” She looked at me with a worried expression. “There isn’t anything else they could want to see, is there?”

  “No, definitely not!” I assured her quickly. But the regulations changed constantly and we usually only found out about it when we got there and were turned away yet again. In the meantime, our three names were not only on the list of Jews wanting to leave for Shanghai, but also for Cuba, Argentina, Palestine, Venezuela, Uru
guay, and Paraguay, not to mention the USA, Sweden, and England. Mamu had met more Jews waiting in various lines than in all the rest of her life combined, and had been infected with the widely shared view that we should be on as many lists as possible, just to be on the safe side.

  “Please try not to get into an argument while I’m gone,” my mother begged me. “These visits to the Gestapo take every ounce of my energy. There’s nothing left for Ruth when I get back here.”

  “It’s better if I go to Bekka’s,” I said, contrite. “Then I don’t have to see the three of them at all. Can’t you tell Aunt Ruth she should have that ugly wart above her lip taken off?”

  “Me, tell her that? Are you crazy?” Mamu replied, but there was a twinkle in her eyes again.

  “It wouldn’t help much, anyway. I don’t think there’s anything pretty about Aunt Ruth. It’s hard to believe you two are sisters.”

  “That’s the root of the problem,” Mamu said. “She was always jealous of me.”

  In the corner of the room there was a bang, the door of the wardrobe flew against the wall, and my cousin Betti rolled out like a billiard ball. She was five, a year older than Evchen, and had the same thick, sullen face, which at the moment was displaying a mixture of triumph and lust for revenge in the wake of her successful spying. “I’m telling, I’m telling!” she sang, and danced past us out of the room.

  “Oh, God,” Mamu muttered, “now this too. Come on, Ziska, let’s get out of here!”

  Surpressing a giggle, I grabbed my jacket.

  The one advantage of our arrangement with Aunt Ruth was that I was living practically around the corner from Bekka. Under normal circumstances I would have asked if I could just move in with her, but unfortunately, the mood at Bekka’s was also very somber—not as charged as at our place, but not any better. Just bad in a different way.

  When I broke the news to Mamu about my fabulous idea that the Liebichs could come with us to Shanghai instead of going to America, she just looked at me sadly and explained, “Ziskele, if no one pays the travel expenses for the Liebichs, they can’t go anywhere at all. Bekka’s father lost his job at City Hall right after the Nazis took power. That was almost six years ago, and their savings are gone. Don’t tell anyone else, but they’ve been seen in the soup kitchen.”