Heritage by Judy Nunn

Mannie as well.’
    Confusion mingled with Samuel’s pain. His head seemed on fire. Mannie? Why would they take Mannie? He wasn’t a Jew. He opened his mouth to enquire, but they were at the front door and Efraim hushed him as he switched off the torch. Then, silently, they edged out into the darkness of the hall.
    Ten minutes later, ensconced in the cellar of the ground-floor flat opposite, Sharon Meisell bathed the caked blood from Samuel’s face and, careful not to start up the bleeding, she applied disinfectant to the open wound where the bullet had splintered his cheekbone and raked an ugly furrow along the side of his head.
    â€˜It will leave a nasty scar but it will mend,’ she announced. ‘You are fortunate you did not lose an eye, Samuel.’
    â€˜An eye?’ Efraim said. ‘He is fortunate to be alive.’
    Efraim and Sharon were accepting the inevitability of what had happened and concentrating on the present, but Samuel was not. Despite the pain which threatened to engulf him, he was barely aware of Sharon’s ministrations as he listened to young Naomi Meisell.
    When the Nazis had first appeared in the street outside, it had been apparent that the object of their raid was the apartment building opposite, and Naomi had ignored her parents’ orders to go with them to their hiding place in the cellar. She had watched through the gauze curtains of the front room instead, and she told Samuel in precise detail everything she had witnessed. Eighteen-year-old Naomi prided herself on her precision and eye for detail and it had a purpose. When she escaped Germany, she had no intention of fleeing to safety with her parents; she would join the nearest resistance group she could find.
    There had been five of them, she told Samuel, one man in plain clothes whom she judged to be Gestapo, and four uniformed SS. ‘One officer and three troopers,’ she said. They had marched Ruth and Mannie out of the building, and little Rachel had been in Ruth’s arms. The three of them had been unhurt, she hastily assured him. Mannie had been carrying a suitcase and he had had his arm around Ruth.
    â€˜Mannie was protecting her, Samuel.’
    As Sharon started cutting away his shirt in order to examine the flesh wound in his upper arm where the other bullet had passed through, Samuel continued to fight against the pain, seizing instead upon the shred of hope Naomi had fed him.
    â€˜Of course,’ he said. ‘That’s why Mannie went with them. Mannie will save her.’ Noticing the look that passed between Efraim and his wife, he realised how unrealistic he must sound to them. But they didn’t understand. ‘Mannie is a lawyer,’ he said, ‘a distinguished lawyer from a respected Aryan family.’
    As the idea formulated in Samuel’s brain, he started to feel light-headed, possibly from his wounds, or from loss of blood, or perhaps … just perhaps … from the dizzying possibility that there might actually be hope. He felt driven to convince them of his argument.
    â€˜When Manfred Brandauer pleads on Ruth’s behalf,’ he insisted, ‘they will listen!’
    The only sound in the room was the slop of the water in the bowl as Sharon started to bathe Samuel’s arm.
    They didn’t believe him, he thought, and who could blame them? He knew what they were thinking. Plead for what? There were no grounds to plead on a Jew’s behalf.
    â€˜Ruth’s mother was a Gentile.’ He tried to sound as if he was pulling an ace from his sleeve, but he knew that his voice lacked the ring of triumph. ‘And she looks Aryan …’ he could hear himself sounding more desperate by the second ‘… that will help when Mannie makes his plea.’
    Sharon stopped bathing the wound and glanced at her husband, who nodded. Efraim, too, knew it had gone far enough. Both of them turned to their daughter.
    â€˜Mannie was wearing