The Hands of War, Page 8

  Mother told Maria that she understood that people sometimes needed to wear a disguise. She said that her husband was totally against the war but had gone into the Luftwaffe so that she and their daughters might live. Hours later three weary men wearing soiled prison stripes finally pulled us out of the rubble. Before Maria was led away to receive medical aid, I noticed that she had quietly jettisoned her swastika pin.

  Where could we go? We were told that we couldn’t get to Brandsende because soldiers had cordoned off the streets near City Hall. A rescue worker told us to go to the Stadtpark. There we would at least be safe from the fires, and we could try to get transportation out of the city. On the way we saw that the Karstadt Department Store had collapsed onto its two air-raid shelters. People who were disinterred from the shelter reserved for store employees and city officials were dazed but unhurt, but rescue workers had taken hundreds of dead women and children from the other shelter and were bringing out more as we passed. Mother squeezed my hand to signal her relief that we had not been in the shelter of the dead.

  There were thousands of desperate refugees in the park by the time we got there. Many looked extremely angry, others glanced about with blank faces, seemingly unable to get their bearings, while a few grinned so foolishly I thought they must have lost their minds. Police and other city officials were loading people into every type of vehicle and sending them off without much inquiry into who was going where. Baby buggies and other paraphernalia were left standing where they had been left; abandoned pets chased one another through the park.

  Five days after the firestorm, my father’s written notice about a found family and his request for news of his lost family.

  I didn’t think that Mother had decided to leave the city, but when a policeman herded us toward the back of a truck with a canvas cover she didn’t pull back or resist. The truck driver demanded some money and answered her question as to where he was going with a single word: “South!” And so we left the city. British fighters were reported to have strafed columns of fleeing refugees, and we stayed off the road the next day, parked in an orchard under trees laden with unripe apples to which we helped ourselves. I found swallowing painful but the tart flavor was heavenly. Mother and I took as many apples as we could carry and still had some when we were dumped in the Bavarian village of Hof at around two in the morning. I was more asleep than awake as arrangements were made to sleep in a room over a tavern beside a trout stream.

  I can’t remember much of the next few days other than the pain that came with eating and breathing. As I recovered I began to appreciate the fact that the bombing had not taken our lives but had kept us from being deported. Although it had been an incredible horror, we had emerged whole and seemingly safe, at least for now. Daily I gained strength and inner happiness from the knowledge that my mother was my savior, my beautiful hero. She had outwitted the Gestapo and faced down the police and the Nazis in the shelter. She had held my hand and led me through the exploding streets; she had never let go.

  Chapter 6

  The Moon in Hiding

  One morning while I was recuperating in Hof there was news from my father. Mother told me she had talked with him by telephone. He had arrived in Hamburg the day after our building had been bombed and had stayed at Cousin Inge’s on Brandsende. He had written a message for us on the wall of our apartment building while the corpses of neighbors lay nearby. Though the British had made another massive raid on the city, Rena, Inge, and her family had survived the bombs. A day or so after the phone call Inge arrived in Hof with Rena and told us that Father had arranged for us to take refuge on the farm of Marie Pimber, the woman who had been taking care of my other sister, Helga.

  Frau Pimber was part of a small network of people, almost all communists or former communists, whom Father had called upon for assistance of one sort or another. But not all of those who risked their lives to oppose the Nazis were willing to assist Jews; some were as anti-Semitic as the next German. Unsure of Frau Pimber’s feelings on this subject, Father had told her that blond-haired, fair-skinned Helga was his daughter, but not that he was married to a Jew. He had encouraged Frau Pimber to present Helga to the local community and authorities as a Christian evacuee from the bombings. Many thousands of children had been sent with government encouragement to live in the countryside with relatives or friends, so there was no reason for anyone to question the arrangement. Helga was in effect hiding in the open, living almost as a member of Frau Pimber’s family.

  When he asked Frau Pimber to hide Mother, Rena, and me, Father had told her we were his family and that we were Jews, which meant that our presence had to be a complete secret from everyone else, including Helga. Frau Pimber didn’t much like the idea of hiding Jews, an offense that could get her killed, but she had been childless until Helga arrived and she had become so attached that she thought of Helga as her own. Faced with the choice of losing Helga or letting us live on her farm, and offered as much material support as Father could muster, Frau Pimber agreed. Mother was relieved, but we were not at all certain what would be in store for us when we reached the Pimber farm.

  I still had not recovered from what Mother and a man in Hof had called smoke poisoning and was more asleep than awake when we arrived after midnight on a cool morning in late August. Mother carried a lantern and the truck driver carried me to a place to sleep. It was impossible to see anything of my surroundings and I didn’t have the energy to try, but I had the uneasy feeling as I lost consciousness again that I was being buried alive instead of being put to bed.

  I awoke hours later lying on a ledge in a dugout or cellar with an earthen ceiling only a foot or so above my head. A woman with a large, pink face wrapped in a black shawl held a lantern and glared at me with eyes as hard and shiny as chestnuts. When I began to cough, she squinted and bared large, stained, forward-slanting teeth as if she would bite me unless I stopped at once. From the darkness I heard my mother’s reassuring voice: “Don’t worry, darling; we are safe, now. Frau Pimber has a nice place where she is going to let us stay.” There was a snort as the bulky woman withdrew, leaving us in the grave-like darkness. Although the dirt roof was too low for Mother to stand erect, she gave me water from a metal cup and stroked my cheeks and forehead until I stopped coughing and fell back to sleep.

  The earthen dugout, I soon learned, was not our primary shelter. A few days after we arrived, we moved into a small shed secluded among oaks and pines, a short dash from the hazelnut bushes that concealed the entrance to the dugout. Covered with tarpaper, the shed had been a place for tools and winter plants, but it was outfitted with a small stove, two cots, one of which I shared with Rena although she preferred to sleep with Mother, a small table, a chair, and a single electric light. We were to stay in the dugout only when visitors came to the farm or when a neighbor, a minor Nazi official, spent holidays or weekends at his country house nearby. Marie Pimber would shut off our electricity to let us know when we had to move into the dugout. Fortunately, the Unterfuhrer’s duties in what was left of Hamburg didn’t allow him to visit his farm often.

  Frau Pimber was as wide as a cow and even more imposing, at least to me. Although I didn’t know why, I knew from the first that she disliked me, and I did my best to avoid getting caught in the glare of her perpetually squinting eyes. When she opened her great jaws I was repelled by the guttural harshness of her voice as well as the hideous teeth. Hiding behind a bush or tree I agonized as she bullied my mother. She never let Mother forget that we would have been killed if she hadn’t agreed to hide us. For every potato, every turnip, she exacted a price in hard labor. With Mother’s agreement, she told Helga that we had fled to Switzerland and didn’t allow Helga to come anywhere near us, perhaps telling her that the people who lived in the woods were evil and would kidnap and kill or sell her if they got the chance. Such stories were told routinely to rural children and wouldn’t raise an eyebrow if repeated. Occasionally I would see Helga’s platinum mop from a distance and feel an a
lmost overpowering urge to approach her and tell her the truth. A natural tomboy and only a year and a half younger, Helga had been my true best friend and natural playmate. But I knew that it was safer for her and for us if our lives were kept separate. I also understood that Helga was Frau Pimber’s hostage and that there was no telling what Frau Pimber would do if the arrangement was disturbed in any way. She might even denounce us.

  Mother peeks out of our hideaway at Frau Pimber’s farm.

  When Frau Pimber wasn’t around I was profoundly thankful for our refuge from the Gestapo. Like everyone else, I knew that Jewish children were being deported to the camps to be killed. After she stopped pretending to be my friend, seven-year-old Monika had taunted me with the threat to have me sent “up the chimney,” meaning sent to a camp to be killed and cremated. Some adults might survive at least for a time as slave laborers, but not the children. I was also grateful to be away from the bombs and the flames. Sometimes, when we had to hide in the dugout, my body would tense and shake as scenes from the bombings silently projected themselves against the utter darkness. Then, and in my dreams, I would see a fireman climb a ladder toward people frantically waving from an upper window of a burning building, and would try to will an ending other than the collapse of the wall into flames. I also saw the baked gingerbread faces of the people who had turned us away from their bunker or the wildly gyrating bodies of people who had been hit by burning phosphorous.

  Such images slowly faded and were sometimes replaced by the distinctive features of an owl, which I willed myself to see in the darkness, having seen the living creature one evening in the branches of a tree. The owl had stared at me and looked fierce, but not threatening, rather as if it would pounce on anything that might try to harm me, such as one of the field mice that sometimes gnawed its way into our shack. I often looked for the owl in the trees and sometimes saw it again, flying from one perch to another or standing majestically in the tree. More often I would hear it calling— whooo . . . whooo . . . whooo. Lying in bed, I would concentrate on the image and voice of the owl to take my mind off my hunger.

  Hunger was constant and often acute. It was so persistent and compelling that much of the time it was difficult to focus on other things. Although we were in the country, the Pimbers’ main crops were hay and wheat, which they sold. They had a small vegetable garden, which Mother weeded and tended, but we were forbidden to take anything unless it was given to us by Frau Pimber’s own hand. So there were many days when we had nothing to eat. A rare feast would be a couple of potatoes, boiled in their jackets so as not to lose a single bit of nourishment. Turnips were more plentiful, and I gratefully accepted when Mother, pretending she couldn’t stand them, gave me part of her portion. She was not only my savior, she was also my teacher, my comforter, my companion, and I loved her and desperately wanted her to be happier. I couldn’t bear it when she was depressed.

  Although Mother possessed seemingly unshakable composure, both of us stopped breathing one autumn morning when there was a heavy knocking on the door of our hut. We knew it wasn’t Frau Pimber, because she never bothered to knock. When the banging persisted, Mother finally opened the door to a woman who was even larger and more ungainly than Frau Pimber. She looked bewildered and her watery blue eyes substantially widened when she entered holding two eggs in her outstretched hand. She continued to look startled and the flesh beneath her chin quivered as she told us that she was Liese, Frau Pimber’s neighbor and oldest friend.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she said, “I won’t tell anyone. I have known since you first came. You have nothing to fear from me; I wouldn’t harm a living thing. Not a thing!”

  After a pause Mother introduced herself. The contrast between the two women was overwhelming. Despite all she had been through, Mother looked as refined and beautiful as a photo in a fashion magazine. The naked light that hung above our table lengthened her lashes and dramatically shaded the high, soft line of her cheeks. Although her large, dark eyes no longer sparkled, sorrow had left a glow inside them that made mine grow moist as I looked at her. Even her damaged and repaired clothes looked smart, while our fleshy visitor resembled a random pile of rather worn laundry. Simple country kindness signed the woman’s coarse features, however, and gave her voice reassuring warmth. She embraced us and kissed Rena. Afterwards we always referred to her as if she were an adored aunt, calling her Tante Lieschen.

  This unexpected visit and the one that followed a few days later made me want to explore the outer limits of our earthy confinement. Although I fully understood the reasons for Mother’s absolute rule against leaving our tiny perimeter, when she was working for Frau Pimber I began to stray beyond the woods, looking for flowers in the grain field along the road. I was drawn inexorably toward the Nazi official’s house. Peering through a bit of hedge along the fence line that separated his property from the Pimbers’, I saw no signs of life. But I did see an apple tree laden with large, red-tinged fruit, which stood not far away, just behind the wire fence. My stomach tied itself into knots while I imagined myself tearing into two tart beauties at once and then taking a skirt-full home to Mother. But I didn’t dare. I went home ravaged by hunger and anxiety. I knew that I couldn’t tell Mother I had gone so close to the Nazi’s house, but at the same time I imagined that she might be so glad to have some apples that she would forgive me for disobeying her if I managed to take some.

  Inevitably I returned to the tree. On the third visit I crawled on all fours close enough to see that there were plenty of apples on the ground just waiting to be carried away. I also saw that one heavily laden branch drooped low enough for me to reach some apples if I climbed up the fence. The longer I considered it the more confident I became. Finally I climbed, careful not to tear my dress on the barbed wire, then reached up and grabbed first one and then a second plump apple. I took a large bite, savoring the juicy flesh, and then another before looking down.

  My triumph quickly turned into terror. A man wearing a felt hat and a forest green jacket was marching toward me from the house, his jaw thrust forward angrily. Almost reflexively, I tried to cover the place on my dress where the Star of David would have been if I had been wearing one. The silly gesture made me wobble on the fence and then lose my balance completely. Falling backward I hit the ground hard enough to knock the air from my lungs and lay gasping, certain that the furious Nazi would soon lay his hands on me. After what seemed like an eternity I managed to rise, retrieve the apples, and run into the woods, where I hid behind a tree until I was confident that I wasn’t being pursued. I tried to eat one of the apples but couldn’t. I hid them and returned to our hut, my heart pounding at the thought of facing Mother. I knew I had betrayed us, and I expected the SS to arrive at any moment with dogs and guns. When Mother asked where I had been and why I looked so pale, guilt exploded inside my chest, but I bit my lip and kept silent.

  That night I dreamed that I found a baby lying in rubble, its blanket smoldering and beginning to flame. I wanted to save it, but a helmeted fireman with an axe in his hand chased me away. Everywhere I turned there was a wall and in every window there was a face ringed with fire. Waking up I saw for an instant the sharp face of the Nazi staring at me. Eventually I went back to sleep, but for many mornings I awoke to the thought that, because of me, soldiers and police with dogs might arrive at any moment to arrest us.

  During one visit Tante Lieschen told us that, although she and Marie Pimber had been friends since childhood, they had never agreed about Communism or Nazism. Tante Lieschen had refused to believe that Hitler was an evil leader. We were the first Jews she had ever known. But since becoming our friend, she found it impossible to reconcile her go-along politics with our plight. She now realized how shameful it was to persecute Jews. But when she had told her old friend about her change of heart, Frau Pimber had become furious and had forbidden her to visit us or send us food. After that, Tante Lieschen came rarely and only at dusk. Even then she rarely escaped Frau Pimber’s increasingly m
alicious eye.

  On my ninth birthday, Tante Lieschen surprised us with the ingredients for a cake. It was my birthday present and would be our first cake in years. While it was baking we inhaled the scent and devoured each crumb a hundred times over in our imagination. When at last it was finished, however, we discovered that Mother had somehow confused the contraband sugar with salt and had put the salt in the batter. The cake looked perfect, but was nauseating. When I tried to eat it anyway, Mother wept as if someone had died.

  Tante Lieschen also loaned us a radio. A few days later, while I stood guard outside our hut as Mother listened to the BBC, I heard and then saw Frau Pimber calling her cat, a beautiful smoky-blue Persian that had been given to her by Tante Lieschen. The cat soon came and Frau Pimber grabbed it up in her arms. But instead of caressing it, she put it into a cloth sack, causing the cat to howl eerily. While I wondered what was going on, Frau Pimber added a rock to the sack, tied it shut with a length of clothesline and carried it to the well between our shed and her house. For a moment she held the writhing bag in front of her, and then dropped it down the well.

  I jumped up and started toward the well but, sensing danger and remembering that I had to get back to my post as Mother’s sentinel, I quickly slumped to the ground. After what seemed an interminable period, Frau Pimber hauled up the line and lifted the dripping but unmoving sack from the well. It was then that she looked in my direction. She made an evil grimace, untied the line and dragged the sack up the hill to her house.