Alex's Wake by Martin Goldsmith Page A

She was a good-natured and good-humored girl, says Frau Wehrmann, although her bad leg made it difficult to run and play with the other girls and she was further isolated by being one of the few Jews in her class. Eva was sometimes mischievous and enjoyed speaking in a hushed voice to lure Anneliese closer and then shaking her head briskly to playfully lash Anneliese with her braids. Eva would then break into such a merry laugh that Anneliese would have no choice but to join in the laughter.
    But by 1936 or ’37, when the girls were sixteen and seventeen years old, it became increasingly dangerous for non-Jews to associate with Jews. There was no written law, says Frau Wehrmann, but the Nazis had created such a toxic climate of fear that people naturally concluded that spending time with a Jew could bring consequences. There was a time, for instance, that Anneliese wanted to invite Eva to her house tostudy. Her parents thought it over for a long time and finally gave their consent, but only under certain conditions. When Eva knocked, insisted her parents, Anneliese should open the door immediately and hustle her friend upstairs to her room. When the studying was over, she must usher Eva out herself, without involving them in order that they might maintain a position of plausible deniability should the authorities inquire. Similarly, when Anneliese attended a birthday party at Eva’s apartment, Anneliese was to look both ways carefully before knocking, to reduce the chance that anyone would see her entering a Jewish home.
    Frau Wehrmann must see the sadness on our faces as she tells these unhappy stories, for she pauses, looks away, and then says softly, “I had no choice, you see. None of us had a choice.”
    She rises then to get more hot water for our tea. Then settling herself heavily into her chair, she shares her last memory of her long-ago friend. Eva was one of the Jewish children dismissed from her school on November 15, 1938. A few days later, Anneliese saw Eva across the street and waved to her. Eva’s eyes widened, she looked around her, then she covered her mouth with her hand to indicate that Anneliese shouldn’t call out, that it wasn’t safe for her friend to be seen talking to her. Eva then ducked her head and hurried away.
    Frau Wehrmann looks at us then and I see tears in her eyes. “That was the last time I ever saw her. To this day I am haunted by that image of her running away from me.” She is silent for a long moment. “And . . . I suppose . . . what happened to her?” she asks in the smallest of voices.
    I answer far more coldly than I intend to. “She was murdered,” I say. “In Riga. Along with her mother. My grandmother. That’s what happened.”
    I rise to leave. “Please don’t blame yourself,” I say, trying to be kind, but a hardness remains in my voice that I cannot dislodge. “Thank you very much for the tea and for your memories of my aunt.” At the door, I turn to her and add, “And thank you for being her friend. Not everyone was.”
    For the rest of the evening and well into the night, I turn my thoughts and feelings regarding Anneliese Wehrmann around and around in myhead. She was my Aunt Eva’s friend, she risked her safety and that of her family to see her deep into the 1930s, and yet it doesn’t seem right—in fact it makes me clench my fists in frustrated anger—that in the end it was Eva who dragged her afflicted leg and her despised “race” away from Anneliese in order to protect her . Dammit, I tell myself, it should have been the other way around: Anneliese should have protected Eva. But how could she have done that in the face of the full force of the brutal gangsterism arrayed against her? As she said, she’d had no choice.
    Yet, with no other individual to blame for the violence visited on my family, Anneliese Wehrmann becomes a convenient scapegoat, and I drift