born a Jew is worse than anything Alice can imagine.And it’s never been any different. By the time she was old enough to talk, Hitler was running the country. Hitler, the all-seeing, all-hearing monster you could complain about only at home, and then only in whispers. Hitler who hates Jews so much he won’t let Jewish children attend school or Jewish grown-ups go to work, who wants Jews out of Germany never mind how long they’ve lived here. Alice has never known anything different. So when her father says with each new repressive law, ‘It’s not good for the Jews’, and repeats the same old refrain with the huge new concentration camps, ‘It’s not good for the Jews’, and now, with vom Rath’s death and still he’s saying, ‘It’s not good for the Jews’, Alice wants to know when has it ever been good for the Jews?
The flat seems to be shrinking. Renate’s despair occupies a lot of space. Not wanting the burden of that dreadful grief, Alice gives her mother a wide berth. She wants to open the windows and let out the smell, but Mutti is always cold and Vati says they mustn’t draw attention to themselves. He says they must be quiet as mice and act as if invisible. He says that if the SS come again, he wants the Fischers to say the Lewins have gone. The wireless, pitched at a murmur, is never turned off. They eat their cold food, they drink their ersatz coffee, they read, they whisper and her father tries to pull strings down the telephone. But no one in Berlin is listening, much less in Palestine or America, Britain or Brazil.
When she is older Alice will say her childhood ended on Kristallnacht , but at the time, while she looks after her parents and negotiates the hostile streets and endears herself to hostile people, she is convinced things will soon return to normal. But even when Martin is feeling better he still does not go out. It is not simply the mess of wounds and bandages, the people are enraged. Vom Rath has achieved a status in death inconceivable when he was alive. And while the transformation of this ordinary functionary into hero and martyred son has occurred across Germany, his home town of Düsseldorf just twenty-five kilometres away has embraced the task with particular fervour. It would be a foolhardy Jew who took to the streets for anything other than essential business.
Martin has tried to contact his brother, but he has disappeared. It seems inconceivable that Fritz with all his connections would have been arrested, and equally inconceivable he would have left for America without telling them. Fritz’s disappearance, Martin’s own injuries, Renate almost comatose, no contacts, poor prospects for visas, no money, and any day now no place to live. In the right hands it would make a good Jewish joke, but as the stuff of your life, it feels like hell.
Some hours speed by, others bog down in futility. As the days pass, Martin’s wounds settle into tolerable aches, the bruising stretches into a palette of murky yellows, greens and browns. Occasionally emotions flicker and spark, but mostly they are leaden on the heart. Life does not exactly go on nor does it peter out, rather it hangs like one of those painted backdrops at the theatre, noticed at first glance, but soon subsumed by the drama being played out in the footlights.
Early the following Wednesday, vom Rath’s body is brought by train to Düsseldorf. It is a dank, foggy day, and as the train passes through the towns from Aachen on the Dutch border to Düsseldorf where the body is to lie in state, the flags are limp at half-mast and the people lining the railway tracks bedraggled in their clothes. Just the right weather for a funeral, Alice decides as she sits on the couch turning the pages of her legends from Greece and Rome, not reading, just looking at the coloured plates. Martin is perched by the wireless, while Renate dull and dazed is in her usual place by the window. Alice glances at both of them before returning to
The flat seems to be shrinking. Renate’s despair occupies a lot of space. Not wanting the burden of that dreadful grief, Alice gives her mother a wide berth. She wants to open the windows and let out the smell, but Mutti is always cold and Vati says they mustn’t draw attention to themselves. He says they must be quiet as mice and act as if invisible. He says that if the SS come again, he wants the Fischers to say the Lewins have gone. The wireless, pitched at a murmur, is never turned off. They eat their cold food, they drink their ersatz coffee, they read, they whisper and her father tries to pull strings down the telephone. But no one in Berlin is listening, much less in Palestine or America, Britain or Brazil.
When she is older Alice will say her childhood ended on Kristallnacht , but at the time, while she looks after her parents and negotiates the hostile streets and endears herself to hostile people, she is convinced things will soon return to normal. But even when Martin is feeling better he still does not go out. It is not simply the mess of wounds and bandages, the people are enraged. Vom Rath has achieved a status in death inconceivable when he was alive. And while the transformation of this ordinary functionary into hero and martyred son has occurred across Germany, his home town of Düsseldorf just twenty-five kilometres away has embraced the task with particular fervour. It would be a foolhardy Jew who took to the streets for anything other than essential business.
Martin has tried to contact his brother, but he has disappeared. It seems inconceivable that Fritz with all his connections would have been arrested, and equally inconceivable he would have left for America without telling them. Fritz’s disappearance, Martin’s own injuries, Renate almost comatose, no contacts, poor prospects for visas, no money, and any day now no place to live. In the right hands it would make a good Jewish joke, but as the stuff of your life, it feels like hell.
Some hours speed by, others bog down in futility. As the days pass, Martin’s wounds settle into tolerable aches, the bruising stretches into a palette of murky yellows, greens and browns. Occasionally emotions flicker and spark, but mostly they are leaden on the heart. Life does not exactly go on nor does it peter out, rather it hangs like one of those painted backdrops at the theatre, noticed at first glance, but soon subsumed by the drama being played out in the footlights.
Early the following Wednesday, vom Rath’s body is brought by train to Düsseldorf. It is a dank, foggy day, and as the train passes through the towns from Aachen on the Dutch border to Düsseldorf where the body is to lie in state, the flags are limp at half-mast and the people lining the railway tracks bedraggled in their clothes. Just the right weather for a funeral, Alice decides as she sits on the couch turning the pages of her legends from Greece and Rome, not reading, just looking at the coloured plates. Martin is perched by the wireless, while Renate dull and dazed is in her usual place by the window. Alice glances at both of them before returning to
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