Let Me Go (11 page)

She smiles mischievously. "And once I was gone, good old Hilde wasted no time and introduced her little sister to Stefan."

I'm surprised. I didn't know about any of this.

"A nasty piece of work, she was," my mother announces bitterly. "I never liked Hilde. I expect she thought she was really something because she worked for the Ministry of Propaganda, and I'm still thoroughly convinced that she was infatuated with Goebbels, but of course he barely noticed she was there. She was very efficient, I wouldn't deny that for a second, but Goebbels didn't pay any attention to her as a woman. He had all those actresses at his feet, and then he had that affair with Baarova. No, Goebbels just saw her as a capable and trustworthy secretary."

I watch her with growing amazement. She can change from one moment to the next, like a chameleon.

She isn't wearing any jewels, not even a ring. Nothing. Her nails and hair are neat and tidy. She seems still to have some connection with the rigor and the military discipline of the past.

I'm interested in what she has to say about my aunt by marriage. I remember a cold and distant Hilde in Berlin in the forties. She always hurried home to change, and then she would immediately return to the office. As the war got worse, we saw her less and less frequently: Often she would sleep in the ministry bunker or in Goebbels's private bunker in his villa overlooking the Tiergarten. At that time all I knew was that she was working for that man whose voice came bellowing from the loudspeakers in the street or from our radios at home. It was only much later that I really understood who Josef Goebbels was and what position he occupied in the Reich hierarchy.

My mother falls silent, having piqued my curiosity. I ask her another question about Hilde, but all of a sudden she flies into a rage: "Your father didn't wait so much as a year to marry that . . . Ursula!"

I protest: "He had two children, and there was a war on. He wanted to give us a mother."

"Give you a mother!" she rants. "What nerve! What would you have needed a mother for? The Reich would have looked after you. The Reich would have looked after my children better than any stepmother."

I say nothing.

Fortunately, the Reich collapsed before it could get Peter and me in its clutches. I still shudder at the thought of our narrow escape.

I murmur, almost to myself, "I didn't want my stepmother— I wanted my grandmother."

Now my mother gives me a sad look that seems as though it might be genuine.

"Didn't you like Ursula?" she asks softly.

I hesitate. I'd rather not spend too much time on this subject.

"She didn't treat me very well," I reply curtly. "And she didn't love me. She never loved me."

What could I have said about my second mother? That she was my enemy from the first day that Peter and I went to live with her? That after sending me first to a house of correction and then to Eden Boarding School, taking advantage of the fact that my father was far away, she managed to persuade him to shut me up in a boarding school again at the end of the war?

I don't say a word, lost in my memories.

"My poor children," she whines now.

"When you were little I called you
Mausi"
she recalls for the second time, "and Peter"—she frowns—"I can't remember."

She sits there sadly for a few minutes, then goes on.

"But you were lively, a little piece of quicksilver you were. You stroked every dog we met and you were very stubborn. You stole bread from the bakery and you liked to hop on one leg. You were always disobedient, and one day you ended up in the pond."

I know the story about the pond from the version my grandmother used to tell. But now I have the opportunity to hear my mother's account of it. I'm curious.

"How did that happen?" I ask.

"It was in Köstendorf," she replies without a moment's hesitation. "I took you there once to let you get a bit of fresh air. There was nothing to breathe in Berlin but hot dust."

"Köstendorf in Austria?"

"Yes. That's where my uncle's farm was. And there was a pond covered with the leaves and flowers of water lilies. You thought it was a field and went happily walking about on it."

She chuckles with amusement. I was about to drown and she chuckles with amusement at the memory.

"And where were you?" I ask.

She seems suddenly annoyed and looks elsewhere.

"I can't remember," she says evasively.

I want to change the subject, but I can't help myself.

"Why not?" I explode irritably. "How come you don't remember? Where were you when I fell into the pond?"

She looks at me strangely, then, with a threatening and irritable glint in her eyes, she shrieks in a falsetto, "I won't let you interrogate me! I won't let you!"

But I remember my grandmother's story very clearly.

WITH THE ANNEXATION of Austria, Adolf Eichmann had been sent to Vienna to organize the forced emigration of the Jews and had set up his general headquarters in the Rothschilds' castle.

The Austrian Jews were summoned to see him there; after which, officially deprived of their citizenship and of any movable or immovable property, and armed only with papers allowing them to cross the border, they were banished from the country, with instructions to leave as quickly as possible and never to set foot on Austrian soil ever again.

My paternal grandmother, who had always been the only intermediary between me and my past, had referred several times to the fact that my mother had had something to do with Adolf Eichmann, but without providing any more detailed information than that. But she did tell me one thing: that when we were on the Köstendorf estate, my mother was summoned to Vienna by Eichmann—I think this must have been immediately before he was recalled to Berlin to run the Central Office of Jewish Affairs.

My mother's departure for the capital meant that someone had to be found to look after me. But the farm was very busy at that time, and none of the farmworkers could guarantee that they would be able to look after me full-time. So their thoughts turned to Siegele, the thirteen-year-old girl whose task it was, when the weather was fine, to bring the cows to pasture on a vast cultivated area of grass not far from the farmhouse.

They had fitted me with a kind of harness with reins, telling Siegele not to let me out of her sight for so much as a moment, but at some point she left me on my own so that she could relieve herself. Next time she looked, I wasn't there: I had resolutely walked toward the pond, and in a trice I was in the water. Fortunately, it wasn't very deep and I had stopped where the water was still shallow, so she didn't have much difficulty pulling me out. I developed a sore throat, she was solemnly chastised, and there were no further consequences.

It wasn't my grandmother's fault: Every time she wanted to bring up the topic of my mother's carelessness, of which she herself had washed her hands, the episode with the pond came up again.

In any case, during the time when we were in Kostendorf, my mother was pregnant with Peter. Having answered Eichmann's call so promptly, she couldn't take on any other tasks, regardless of what they were.

I LOOK AT MY MOTHER with a combination of resignation and resentment. A shame: She's avoided the truth yet again. She is sly, unfair, even hypocritical. But she's still my mother. And this is the last time that I'll see her.

With a shudder I seek her eye, but she's being elusive now. She is contemplating herself, looking inside and seeing only what she wants to see. Good God, I think, what will I be left with after this encounter? What truth has she given me during these past two hours, apart from emphasizing the few memories that are still dear to her, and which touch her pride or her vanity? She insists on talking about Hilde, for example, my aunt by marriage. She refuses to remember the pond in Köstendorf, preferring to fan the flames of her ancient rancor toward the woman who had introduced my father to the young and lovely Ursula.

"If she hadn't gone to buy 'Lions in the Savannah' that day," she insists, "she wouldn't have met Stefan, and she wouldn't have gone on to hand him her little sister on a silver platter." And once again I don't understand. If she was so fond of her husband, why did she leave him in 1941?

And yet I let her go on talking. I want to take advantage of the opportunity to prepare to leave. For another few minutes the object of her resentment will be Hilde, the same Hilde who took my brother and me to Hitler's bunker in 1944, along with many other Berlin children, so that we could serve in one of Goebbels's many propaganda campaigns. This one was designed to spread the myth of a human and sympathetic Führer who acted as host to hundreds of children in the big bunker beneath the New Chancellery, to give them medicine, food, and comfort.

We went to the bunker. I didn't want to. I didn't want to come out of one refuge to go into another one, however much bigger it was, even if it was absolutely enormous, a kind of citadel holding about six or seven hundred people.

It was early December 1944, before the SS drew up the infamous "Night and Fog" decree, which focused their attention on the anti-Fascists and anti-Nazis in the occupied territories, inflicting the most appalling deaths upon them. Hitler's followers were instructed to kill all prisoners of war without exception, along with all anti-Fascists held in prisons and concentration camps. Many were murdered merely for "defeatism."

My brother and I, I told her, went to the bunker. One morning a camouflaged, coal-driven bus—a
Kokskocher
—showed up. We climbed aboard and set off across a Berlin that was now nothing but an enormous smoking pyre. A month past my seventh birthday, I sat in amazement and gazed out the window at the scene passing before my eyes.

Ruins, then more ruins, some still ablaze, flames reaching into the sky. Piles of corpses were heaped up on the shattered pavements. There was nothing to be seen anywhere but the most savage destruction.

In Hitler's bunker we were given food and medicine; I don't recall so much as a scrap of comfort. We were immediately examined by doctors, chiefly, I should imagine, to avoid any risk of contagion to the Führer, who was about to come and see us. We were dosed with vitamins and with the hateful cod liver oil; we were tested for tuberculosis and even put under a quartz lamp to make us look healthy and well. The Führer hated to see pale and undernourished children.

Yes, we met him, the Führer of the Third Reich. He came with his bodyguards and shook hands with the children in the front row, including my brother and myself—a troop of unhappy children trembling with emotion and exhausted by the war.

I stared at the great Führer and couldn't believe what I saw. To the undeceived eyes of a child, he was a sick-looking, wrinkled old man. He had a limp, one of his arms looked as though it was made of plaster, and his head trembled slightly. But his gaze was still forceful and intense. I felt as though I were being hypnotized by a snake.

I wasn't aware of any benevolence in his question "How do you like it in the bunker?" I couldn't detect any pity or sympathy on his part. No, Adolf Hitler didn't like children, any more than my mother did. Shortly before Germany's defeat, he sent hundreds of thousands of boys to certain death. I remember two of those young victims, whom I saw abandoned on the edge of a pile of rubble. Their eyes were narrowed to slits, their bodies disfigured. What remained of their gray-blue uniforms was nothing but blood-drenched rags; they still wore their flasks around their waists, along with hand grenades, rifle ammunition, and gas masks. It was the day after the surrender.

And my mother? Did she ever, even for a single moment, love her children?

Berlin, 1941
—
District of Niederschönhausen

My mother looked at me severely. "You've got to be very strong now," she said, "Mama has to go away. Aunt Margarete will soon be coming to get you. You're going to go to your aunt's villa—you like your aunt's villa, don't you? And you'll be with your cousin Eva. Do you promise your mother you'll be a good girl?"

"I don't want to go and stay with cousin Eva," I whined. "She's always calling me a stupid cow and won't let me touch her dolls."

"Well, you're going!" my mother says impatiently. "And so is your brother. And you're going to be good and not drive your aunt Margarete mad. So no more nonsense!"

She spoke very sharply.

"And don't cry!" she ordered, seeing that my mouth was beginning to crumple. "You're always the same, always whining!"

She was tense, nervous. She was clearly in a hurry.

Terrified, I tried to obey. I sensed that something serious and irrevocable was taking place. I glanced out of the window. Night was falling and the blackout would soon have to go up.

I hated those horrible rolls of black cardboard. They had been fitted to all the windows by an old workman with only one eye (a souvenir of the first war, he explained) "on government instructions." When my father, who had fought in an antiaircraft division, returned from the front, he told us that all this business with blackouts was so much nonsense. The Allied bomber squadrons were perfectly able, simply by following their radio instructions from headquarters, to locate their targets even if they were flying blind. But no one dared to say that the blackouts in the city were entirely useless. To voice such an opinion during the war would have been considered an act of defeatism.

My mother gave me a quick peck on the cheek and moved toward the little suitcase that was ready and waiting near the front door. I was overcome by panic.

"Don't go away," I pleaded.

She turned around and stared at me, exasperated.

"Is that how you keep your promises? You promised to be a good girl, and here you are doing nothing but whining. But it's useless, Helga—I've got to go—don't make things so hard for me."

I tilted my head, and in a heroic attempt to "be good," I gritted my teeth so as not to burst into tears.

She put on something light-colored. I think it was a raincoat, and her long wavy hair fell on either side of her face. When she bent down to give me one last kiss, I instinctively grabbed that hair with both hands. "Don't go away,
Mutti,
please, don't leave me alone."