Holocaust (2 page)

I tried to lead a cheer, but the Helms family still didn’t seem very cheerful. The accordionist struck up another tune. More champagne was poured. Inga forced Karl to kiss her again—lips apart, their eyes shut in passion.

My father toasted our new in-laws. Then he introduced my mother’s parents, the Palitzes, greeted the Helms family by name, and introduced my Uncle Moses.

“Enough introductions, Josef, and more champagne,” my grandfather said. “You make it sound like a medical lecture.”

A few people laughed.

There was a burly man seated next to Mr. Helms who did not smile. I saw under his lapel a h
akenkreuz
pin—what the English and Americans call a swastika. His name was Heinz Muller, and he worked in the factory with Mr. Helms. And when my Uncle Moses, a shy, plain man, had been introduced, I heard this Muller whisper to Inga’s father, “Hear that, Helms?
Moses.”

I made believe I was arguing with Anna and kept an ear tuned to what this fellow was saying. He asked Hans, “Anyone try to talk your sister out of this?”

“Sure,” Hans Helms said. “But you know how she is when she makes her mind up about something.”

Brother knew sister. Inga had set her sights on Karl, and now she had him. She had overcome the opposition of her own family and of my family, and the atmosphere of the times, and she had married Karl, in a civil wedding so as to offend no one’s sensibilities. For all her strength, I sensed a tenderness and compassion in her. She was, for example, very close to Anna and me, interested in our schoolwork, our hobbies. She had begun to teach Anna needlepoint work; had watched me play soccer. And she treated my parents with the utmost respect. (My mother kept her at a distance, I might add, and continued to do so for a few years.)

It was now Mr. Helms’ turn to propose toasts. He
got to his feet, a stubby man in a shapeless suit, and offered praise to all, ending with a tribute to his son Hans, in the service of “the glorious Fatherland.”

This intrigued my grandfather, Mr. Palitz, whose eyes lit up. He smiled at Hans. “What branch, son?”

“Infantry.”

“I was infantry myself. Captain in the Second Machine-gun Regiment. Iron Cross, First Class.” He fingered the boutonnière he always wore. It was as if he were saying to all of them, “Please notice. I am a Jew, and a good German, and as patriotic as anyone here.”

I heard Muller mutter to Hans, “Wouldn’t be allowed to clean an army latrine today.”

Grandpa didn’t hear him, but there was a moment of strain. Inga suggested we dance to
Tales from the Vienna Woods
. People got up to waltz.

Anna tugged at my elbow. “Come on, Rudi, dance.”

“I can’t stand your perfume.”

“I don’t use any. I am naturally sweet.”

She stuck her tongue out at me, and turned to Uncle Moses. I’d gotten up to stretch, and I could hear my father talking to his brother.

“I know what you’re thinking, Moses,” my father was saying apologetically. “No religious ceremony. No breaking of the glass. Don’t think ill of us. The boys were bar-mitzvah’d. Berta and I still attend synagogue on the holidays.”

“Josef, you need not apologize to me.”

Anna was persistent. “Uncle Moses! Dance with me!” She dragged him to the lawn under the summer trees. I can remember the way the sunlight and the shade formed checkered patterns on the dancers.

“Are you happy?” my father asked my mother.

“If Karl is happy, I am.”

“You haven’t answered me.”

“I gave you as good an answer as I can.”

“They are fine people,” my father said. “And Karl loves her so much. She’ll be good for him. A strong woman.”

“So I have noticed, Josef.”

I made believe I was a bit tipsy, wandered around the table, and caught scraps of conversation. Muller was holding forth again, talking in a low voice with Mr. Helms, Hans and some of their relatives.

“Too bad you couldn’t have made Inga wait a few months,” Muller was saying. “The party bigshots tell me new laws are in the works. No mixed marriages. Might have saved you a lot of heartache.”

“Oh, they aren’t like the
others,”
Mr. Helms said. “You know … physician … old man a war hero …”

Suddenly Hans Helms was seized with a fit of coughing. He’d been smoking a cigar and he seemed to be strangling on it.

My father, who was waltzing with my mother, left her and came running to Hans. Quickly, he forced Hans to swallow a cup of tea. Amazingly, the seizure stopped.

“An old remedy,” my father said. “Tea counteracts the nicotine. Something I learned when I was a medical student.”

The Helms party looked at my father curiously. I could almost read their minds.
Jew. Doctor. Intelligent. Polite
.

“Exactly what kind of a doctor are you, Dr. Weiss?” Muller asked arrogantly.

“A good one,” I shouted. I wanted to add, “None of your damned business.”

“Rudi!” my mother said. “Manners!”

“I’m in general practice,” my father replied. “A small private clinic on Groningstrasse.”

Hans collapsed into a chair. His eyes were tearing, his collar open. His mother was patting his blond head. “Poor Hans. I hope they treat him well in the army.”

My father tried a little joke. “If they don’t, you have a physician in the family now. I make night calls, also.”

Inga and Karl kept dancing, floating, joyful. So did a few other couples. My grandfather sat down opposite young Helms.

“Guess it’s changed since my day,” Grandpa Palitz said.

“I guess so,” Hans said. “Were you in combat?”

“Combat? How did you think I got my Iron Cross?
Verdun, Chemins des Dames, Metz. I went through it all.”

Mrs. Helms looked uneasy. “Let’s pray there are no more wars.”

“I’ll drink to that, madame,” my grandfather said.

Muller sat down next to Hans. There was a vague smile on his face as he studied my grandfather’s white head.

“Understand your son-in-law was born in Warsaw,” he said suddenly. “Still technically a Polish citizen.” “What of it?”

“Just wondering where your family loyalties are, considering the international situation.”

“I don’t give a damn about politics,” Grandpa Palitz said.

My mother, overhearing him as she danced, came back to the table. The music stopped for a moment. Inga and Karl and my father also gathered around.

“We don’t discuss politics,” my mother said firmly. “My husband considers himself as German as I do. He went to medical school here and he’s practiced here.”

“No offense, madame,” Muller said. Again, that flat, cold smile widened his mouth. It was a smile I was to encounter in so many of them over the years. Look at the photos of the end of the Warsaw ghetto. And you will see this smile on the faces of the conquerors, the murderers of women and children. Study the photographs of the naked women lined up outside the chambers at Auschwitz, then see the faces of the armed guards.
Smiling
. Always some strange humor moves them to smile. Why? Is it a smile of shame? Are they hiding their guilt with laughter? I doubt it. Perhaps it is nothing more than the essence of evil; a distillation of everything that is vile and destructive in man.

Tamar, my wife, who is a psychologist, shrugs her shoulders when I talk of this. “They smile because they smile,” she says, with a sabra’s cynicism. “It is funny to them when others suffer and die.”

My father now supported my mother’s reluctance to discuss politics with Muller or any of the Helms family.
In his polite way, he said he was an expert only on things like influenza, and setting fractures; politics were not his field.

But Grandpa Palitz was not the man to take a hint. He leaned across the table—summer wasps and bees now buzzed around the fruit and the melting ice cream—and leveled his pipe at Muller and Helms.

“Hindenberg, there was a man for you,” Grandpa said.

“A patriot, yes,” Muller said. “But old-fashioned. Behind the times.”

“Bah!” my grandfather said. “We need a few like him today. Some honest generals. The army should run that gang right out of office.”

Muller’s eyes were almost closed. “What gang?”

“You know who I’m talking about. A few good army men could handle them in an afternoon.”

Again, there was an embarrassed silence. My parents were shaking their heads. Mama touched her father’s arm. “Not today, Papa, please.”

Inga came to the rescue. In her lilting voice she said, “I can’t believe it, Karl! The militarists are all on your side of the family!”

People laughed. My father made a joke about Grandpa reenlisting. Mr. and Mrs. Helms and their son were silent. Muller started to whisper something in Mr. Helms’ ear, then stopped.

Inga tried to liven up the wedding party. “Why don’t we all sing? What would anyone like to sing?”

She gestured to the accordion player to join us. Soon Inga was making people get to their feet, gather in a circle.

Inga had this power, this gift, of getting things done, of influencing people—not cruelly, or by playing the domineering female, but by the gayness and liveliness of her personality. She seemed to enjoy every moment of her life, and she had the gift of transferring this joy to others. Once she took Anna and me to the zoo for the day, and I cannot remember enjoying the animals so much, walking until my feet ached, but happy to be with her and with Karl. Yet oddly, she was not a well-educated
girl—business school was the limit of her training—and she was not effusive, or loud, or boisterous. She was quite simply
alive
, loved life, and made one feel the same way.

“Do you know the
Lorelei?”
asked my mother.

The accordion player bowed his head. “I’m sorry, madame. But Heine …”

“Heine is forbidden?” my mother asked, incredulous.

“You see, the party’s musical department says—”

“Please,” my mother said.

“Go on,” Inga said. She kissed the musician on his forehead. “You must play it for a bride. I love it.”

He began to play. Karl put his arm around Inga, Inga put her arm around my father, and so on. But the Helms family, while joining in the song, seemed a bit apart from us. The old melody, the old words lingered in the hot, summery air.

Uncle Moses nudged me as I walked by. “I’d have preferred to have heard
Raisins and Almonds.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. He was a kind and devoted man, but he was—
different
. Polish Jews, my mother often said (not in any critical way), were just
different
.

“Singing is boring,” Anna said. “Look what I brought along.”

She had a kid’s soccer ball, and she bounced it off my head. Soon I was chasing her, and we were kicking the ball on the lawn in back of the restaurant. I teased her, pushing the ball past her, faking her out of position, every now and then letting her get the best of me. Once she slipped on the grass and went down.

“You did that on purpose,” Anna cried.

“An accident!”

“I’ll show you, you rat!”

And she kicked the ball over my head—and into a
group of men dining in a protected little area of the garden.

I ran after it. Then I stopped. One of the men had picked the ball up and was holding it out. “Yours, kid?”

“Yes,” I said.

There were three of them. Youngish, sort of heavy. All wore the brown shirts, baggy brown trousers and black boots of the Storm Troopers. Each wore a swastika armband—the black spiked cross in a white circle, the rest of the band scarlet. I looked at their faces. Ordinary Berlin faces, men you might see in any beer garden on any Sunday, drinking beer, smoking. Except for the uniforms.

I knew who they were, and what they thought of us, and what they were doing to us. Just a year ago, I’d gotten into a street fight with some of them. I’d got my eye blackened, knocked one of them down, and then I’d run like the wind, over fences and into alleys to escape them.

“What are you looking at, kid?” the man who held the ball asked.

“Nothing.”

Anna was several yards behind me. She saw them too, and she began to back away. I wanted to say to her,
Don’t, don’t show them you’re afraid, they don’t know we’re Jews
. Her face was pale and she kept moving away. She seemed to understand, perhaps better than I did, that these were our enemies, that nothing we did, or said, or pretended to be, could save us from that blind, unreasoning hate. Yet the men now seemed indifferent to us.

The ball was booted at me. I hit it with my head, in a perfect arc, and when it came down, I kicked it toward Anna. I had the feeling of a narrow escape, although from what I was not sure.

Anna and I stopped under the shade of a laurel tree. We looked again at the three Storm Troopers.

“The wedding party’s ruined,” she said.

“No it isn’t,” I said. “They’re nothing to us.”

We could hear our family and the Helmses, singing on the other side of the hedges.

“Come on,” I said. “I’ll play goalie and you try to kick it past me.”

“No. I don’t want to play soccer, and I don’t want to sing.”

She ran off. I tossed the ball gently at her and hit her in the backside. Normally Anna, spunky, always ready to tease, would have turned and tried to get even with me. But she just kept running. I looked once more at the men in brown shirts, and I wondered to myself whether we should all be running.

Berlin
September 1935

Marta complained again today of fatigue. She has not been right since Laura’s birth. I insisted she see a doctor.

Having just moved into this tiny flat in this quarter (where I lived years ago as a boy), I recalled a certain Dr. Josef Weiss on Groningstrasse. My parents had used him, and sure enough, his office is still there in a four-story limestone building. He and his family still live in the upper stories, and his clinic occupies the ground floor.

Dr. Weiss, a soft-spoken, rather weary-looking man, examined Marta thoroughly, and then, as gently as possible, said that he suspected she had a slight systolic murmur. Marta and I must have looked shocked, but he assured us it was of a minor nature, probably connected with her anemia. He prescribed something to strengthen her blood, and told her not to overexert herself.