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17
Sofie
Berlin,Germany
1935
Once when I was young, I tagged along on my parents’ resort vacation to Étretat, in France. I was fascinated by L’Aiguille, the famous needle rock formation, as well as the archways of rock that looped out over the ocean. But my favorite feature was a little cave, tucked at the other end of the beach opposite the resort. I’d been exploring its nooks and crannies all week. On the last morning I sat with my nanny, side by side at the cave’s mouth, watching the waves roll toward our ankles.
“How did this happen?” I asked her. I stared up at the rock ceiling and enjoyed a shiver of adrenaline as I thought about the weight of the coast’s famous alabaster chalk above us.
“It takes a very long time to carve out a cave like this,” she said. “Millions of years. Every wave washes away just a tiny bit of the rock. Even this week, it’s grown. It’s just happened too slowly for us to see it.”
I thought about that a lot after the Nazis came to power and the trickle of anti-Jewish decrees began. The new laws were so narrow at first that they attracted little outcry. First came the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service,which mandated that civil servants provide proof of Aryan heritage. Most were easily able to do this. Those who had Jewish heritage, like Mayim’s father, Levi, were quietly dismissed.
Then came limits on the number of Jewish students at certain schools and colleges. Few beyond those directly affected even understood the impact of this. And when restrictions came for Jewish doctors, their licenses weren’t revoked—not at first. They could still practice, only now they could not claim reimbursement from public health insurance funds. Who would protest a minor administrative change? Not the Aryan doctors, that was for sure—they benefited because their Jewish competition soon went out of business. And by then, the rest of us were awash in propaganda that painted Jews as money obsessed and greedy. Few paid any attention when Jewish doctors tried to protest.
Hundreds of these decrees were passed, one by one. This is how polite society gives way to chaos. The collapse that comes at the end of the process is a consequence of the slow erosion over time.
The shift was happening with Lydia and Karl too, long before I recognized it. That polite distance between the zu Schillers and Mayim was once easy to explain away. But ever so slowly, the pattern of inviting Jürgen and me to this outing or that, leaving Mayim out of the equation altogether, became entrenched.
“Maybe Mayim could tag along?” I suggested one day, when Lydia invited us to the opera.
“Oh, I only have four tickets,” she told me. And then a few weeks later, when I wanted to bring Mayim to dinner: “Karl and Jürgen need to talk about rocket business, and you know how secretive all that is.”
After that, Lydia called to plan a trip to the Berlin Zoo for Horst and Ernst’s birthday. I twisted the telephone cord around my hand, feeling strangely nervous as I suggested, “Mayim can join us. She loves the zoo, and she’ll be such a great help with the children.”
“Oh, no nannies this time. Better if it’s just us, I think,” Lydia said lightly.
“You know very well that Mayim isnotour nanny, Lydia,” I snapped. “Do you have a problem with her?”
“Of course not,” Lydia said, laughing easily, as if I were foolish to ask. “I’d prefer we keep it a small group, that’s all.”
Karl and Jürgen now worked closely together and there seemed no easy way to extract myself from my friendship with Lydia, even after a dinner party that removed any doubt.
I’d been anxious about the dinner for weeks. Lydia assured me we needed new dresses for the occasion, and while I was grateful to be able to visit the dressmaker without worrying about the cost, her insistence only reminded me what a milestone this event would be. The rocket program was almost two years old and the tiny team that once comprised only Jürgen and Karl had grown to dozens of men. This would be the first social gathering of the most senior of the staff with their wives—and most importantly, Jürgen and Karl’s boss, Otto Werner.
“Well, aren’t you a vision?” Jürgen said, when I joined him in the foyer. He had been paid a huge bonus when the rocket program successfully launched a small prototype the previous summer, and he’d given me every cent. I saved some in the safe in Jürgen’s office and gave the rest to Mayim, and she convinced her parents to take it. After Levi lost his civil service job, he found work in a quarry—but within a few months, he badly injured his back. Now he couldn’t work at all—some days, the injury left him bedbound. The family had been surviving on Moshe’s scant wages from his part-time bakery job before school, as well as help from the Reichsvertretung, the Jewish self-help charity. Jürgen and I agreed that we would give them every Reichsmark we could spare.
I admired the fit of Jürgen’s double-breasted silver-gray suit, and the tight knot of his navy-and-white polka-dot tie. He scooped a gray hat from the rack, then extended his elbow toward me.
“Shall we?”
But then the children appeared on the landing, dutifully coming downstairs to say goodbye. Georg was five and looking forward to entering theGrundschuleelementary school program in the summer. Laura, at three, had a striking combination of my auburn hair and Jürgen’s thick waves, his bright blue eyes and my petite nose.
“Mama, you look so pretty,” Georg told me, eyes wide. The morning of the party, I’d been to the salon and had my hair set, and I’d purchased a new lipstick. I was touched that my little boy noticed the extra effort.
“Thank you, treasure.”
“Laura has some lipstick too?” Laura asked hopefully. Mayim, who joined us in the foyer, hid a smile as she extended a hand. Laura ran unsteadily down the last set of stairs to take it.
“Maybe you can try some of mine on after we have dinner,” Mayim told her. Laura gasped in delight as they waved us off.
I was nervous about meeting Otto. He wasn’t just Jürgen and Karl’s boss and a manager with the program—he was also a senior member of the Nazi party. Otto’s wife, Helene, would be in attendance too, as well as the other senior staff from the Kummersdorf program...and our neighbors Dietger and Anne Schneider, who lived across the road from us.
Dietger had recently been appointed the official NaziBlockleiter—our neighborhood block warden. He was the perfect choice. He had always been the neighborhood gossip, and the authority that came with the role only amplified his keen observation skills. I had no idea how he kept abreast of the business of the entire neighborhood, but if a window was smashed, he knew how it happened, seemingly before the owner did. If a husband and wife had an argument, he knew who was at fault and who had been wronged. It was because of Dietger that Jürgen, Mayim, and I realized we had no choice but to adopt the now-standard greeting—the Hitler salute. Another neighbor from around the corner, Leopold Braunbeck, refused to give Dietger the salute. By the next morning, Leopold was imprisoned in one of the horrid concentration camps the Nazis had set up to punish their political enemies. It was months before Leopold was released, and when he came home, he was a quiet, compliant shadow of his former self.
Maybe once upon a time, we’d have said a variation onhelloorgood daya handful of times each day, but now we were absurd parrots, greeting every person we encountered with aHeil Hitler.
