Munich Signature (12 page)

“In the meantime you must finish your tea and wash your face and say your prayers.”

“And go to America?” Elisa asked painfully.

“For the sake of Charles. Yes. There is much the boy still must go through, and we must be strong for the sake of the children, Elisa. We must teach them to live now, but also to see their lives through those hundred-year glasses.” Anna frowned. “Such a point of view somehow makes each moment, each action, each prayer seem much more important, I think. Especially in such dark times as these.”

Just for a moment Elisa slipped into the dark room where Charles slept. The cello case was open in the corner. The child opened it each night before he went to sleep. Its dignified presence seemed to comfort him with the promise that he would indeed see his brother Louis and dear Leah once again.

Elisa let her eyes linger on the instrument. She pictured Leah sitting in the shadows behind it. If she listened carefully, she could hear music. Elisa smiled. A hundred years from now the old cello would probably still be around. Another generation of musicians would play the music of Bach and Schubert and Mendelssohn, just as others had played the songs before Leah and Elisa were born. The thought warmed away the chill of fear that had gripped her heart. She gazed tenderly down on Charles. His head was turned on the pillow as if he had been listening to music. His fingers curved as if he touched the strings.

Elisa stroked his forehead, smoothing back a lock of soft blond hair. He sighed with contentment and his cheek moved as if he would smile.
Very soon you will smile, Charles. And very soon you will speak and sing like other children,
she thought. What would this small, frail boy say? What gentle words must live in such a heart!

Charles opened his eyes and gazed up at Elisa in drowsy contentment. Those blue eyes smiled and spoke clearly to her. He reached up and slipped his fingers into her hand as if to say,
“
It will be all right. Do not worry, Elisa. You will see. We will be together again, all of us. And even a hundred years will not seem like a long time.”

***

It was an event that called for celebration in the city of Hamburg. Since early morning, busloads of Hitler Youth had been arriving on the docks to wave their Nazi flags and to shout obscenities as the Jews passed through the gauntlet of SS soldiers and Gestapo guards on their way to the freighter.

Most of the Jews were children, not older than those who cursed and spat on them from the sidelines. Some of the Jews were women, ringed by frightened little ones who clung to their skirts and trembled before the angry mob. A few, very few, were men who had managed to avoid arrest as enemies of the Reich. They all had one thing in common—they were the lucky Jews in Germany, the ones who had by some miracle managed to buy their way out of the country. They were eight hundred souls who were fortunate enough to be granted exit visas. They were leaving Germany with nothing but the clothes they wore on their backs. But they were alive, at least. They were indeed lucky.

“Filthy swine Jews!”

“Get out! Jews out! Jews out!”

“May you drown like rats!”

“Stinking . . . ”

“Christ-killing filth! Good riddance!”

Plank by plank the eight hundred climbed the ramp and crowded onto the deck of an ancient, rusted hulk that had never been built to carry human cargo. There was not room for even one hundred on the freighter, but eight hundred gladly crammed together in the cargo hold, the narrow corridors, on the steps, and in the galley. Small groups claimed a place beside a coil of rope or beneath a rust-streaked porthole.

The Gestapo still prowled among them, stepping over bodies, checking papers for the thousandth time. Here and there shrieks of grief and terror rose up as the state police chose one more victim to sacrifice, one more enemy of the Reich to tear from his family! And the numbers dwindled from eight hundred to seven hundred eighty-four. Eighty-three. Eighty. Seventy-nine. Seventy-six.

Below on the quay the Hitler Youth shouted for blood as Jewish criminals with ashen faces were led back down the ramp. “Kill the Jewish filth! Wipe them off your boots! Don’t bring them back into Hamburg alive!”

Truncheons and hobnailed boots motivated those who tried to cling to the rails of the ship. “So you thought you were safe! You thought you would get away!”

It was the living example of the child’s board game played happily by the Aryan schoolchildren of Hitler’s Reich—roll the dice and land on the proper square, and you chase the Jews out! It was an event of such joyous celebration that the brigades of Hitler Youth would remember the sight for a lifetime. They would someday tell their grandchildren: “I was on the docks cheering when we shoved the last stinking Jew into the water!”

Of course, these were certainly not the last Jews in Hamburg. But they were the last who would leave the country legally with an exit visa. No doubt the government had other things in mind for the Jews who remained behind.

As wives wept and watched their arrested husbands being dragged toward the waiting police vans, the mooring lines were cast loose even before the ramp was raised.

Applause and still more curses rose up to drown out a last farewell.

“Philip!”

“Daddy! Daddy!”

“Johann! Liebchen! Johann!”

A hail of rocks and bottles and spit flew upward onto the decks to christen the creaking hull with Aryan contempt and hatred. Seven hundred seventy-six lucky Jews were leaving the German port of Hamburg that morning. The free press would cover that departure. News and photographs would grace the back pages of several European newspapers as proof that Jews . . . some Jews . . . were indeed allowed passage out of Germany. The Führer
encouraged
Jews to leave, as a matter of fact. Had he not sent the legions of his youthful disciples to cheer the departure?

Yes. Jews could leave Germany if they so wished. If they paid their taxes and fines. If they took no more than twelve marks out of the country. If they were not considered potential enemies to the Reich. If they signed a release extolling the kindness and fair treatment of the German government. If they . . .

Slowly, slowly, the listing, rusty hulk of the
SS Darien
rumbled out of the port of the Elbe River toward the safety of the open sea. The
Darien
had charted no course for the journey. The captain of the ship, the crew, the passengers still did not know their destination. They had no distant harbor to look for, no future home. No nation on the face of the earth had yet granted the
Darien
permission to anchor. No government had offered haven to these homeless ones who crowded sun-cracked decks and searched the jagged skyline of the nation that had once been home.

The ocean swells were a more solid place to stand than the soil of Germany now. Those whom they had left behind were condemned to drown in a storm more violent than the North Sea could ever devise.

The
SS Darien
. Destination: unknown. Cargo: seven hundred seventy-six lucky Jews.

7

Training Ground

The terrorist training grounds of the Nazi SS were tucked into the hills a few miles beyond Munich. The barracks housed men from many different countries whose leaders had formed a common bond with the Third Reich.

More than languages separated the units. Racial barriers were a common problem in the training of these men. Those of Aryan blood from Czechoslovakia despised the Arabs who had come for training from Palestine. The Aryans from France likewise hated the Spanish terrorists who had been sent by Franco.

Stronger bonds united them, however. Each unit shared the goals of the triumph of fascism, the hatred of Jews, and the destruction of the Western democracies. Even in Germany, these things transcended the issues of race and German culture. Hitler himself was a leader who said that the issue of race was simply used to unify the masses toward one goal.

Thirteen Arabs had come for training at the request of Haj Amin el Husseini. The annihilation of the Zionists was his goal, and it bonded him strongly to Hitler. Today those dark-skinned Arabs stood in a semi-circle among a group of twenty-two Germans from the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia.

At the center of this group was an aging Mercedes with an open hood. Besides its right front fender stood Georg Wand, a man small of stature but great in his accomplishments for the Reich.

An observer looking over the tall stone wall of the compound might have mistaken this gathering for a lecture on auto repair. In fact, it was a demonstration of the ease with which an automobile and its occupants might be blown to pieces.

Georg held up the length of copper pipe for all the group to see. It was the most ordinary sort of pipe used in all modern plumbing, he explained through an interpreter. Sealed on one end, the pipe was then packed with explosives, and a spark plug was placed in the other end. To the spark plug a wire was attached.

Raising his voice as he pointed beneath the hood, he smiled benignly. “This is the distributor. You see these wires lead from the distributor to the spark plugs of the engine! So! It is a simple matter of unplugging one wire from the spark plug and attaching it to our little bomb. When the victim starts the car, the electric charge runs through the wire, and the spark plug ignites the explosives.”

He attached the device in seconds as a murmur of approval passed through the students. It was so very easy. One could do it by feel in the dark!

“And now, shall we demonstrate what happens?” The group followed him meekly into a concrete bunker. Dark glasses were handed to them as they took their places to peer out at the Mercedes. Georg Wand counted to three and turned the remote switch that started the car. In that instant a scorching blast tore through the metal of the machine and a cloud of fire consumed the interior, devouring the dummies that had been placed there for effect. The hood was shredded and sent flying fifty feet in the air, along with bits of glowing metal that would mow down anyone in the immediate area. Well-placed, a car bomb could be a device that might kill and maim hundreds!

The students applauded as the last chunks of metal fell to the ground around the burning skeleton of the automobile.

Georg Wand posed the question. “How might you use such a device in Jerusalem?”

Hands went up. He chose a young, rather Aryan-looking Arab to answer. “In the Jewish shopping district. Or perhaps at the motor pool of the British headquarters.”

“And what will be the effect of such devastation?”

“Terror!”

“To what end?”

“To frighten the government into accepting our demands.”

“Which are?”

“The immediate closure of Jewish land purchases and Jewish immigration.”

Georg Wand smiled approval. His gold tooth glinted. “Good.
Very
good! And now . . . in the Czech Sudetenland? What are your goals?”

The answer of the Sudeten-German trainee was stopped short by the emergence of a tall black-shirted SS officer. He strode through the students and bent to whisper a summons in the ear of Georg Wand. Teaching terrorist tactics to men from beyond the borders of the Reich was a duty that fell outside of Georg’s usual assignments as a Gestapo agent. It was a hobby, really, which satisfied his wish to see military action. Now Heinrich Himmler had something more important for him to test his mental powers on.

“Sergeant Richter will now take over the class,” Wand announced without ceremony. “I am called to Berlin. I wish you all the best of success. Heil Hitler.”

A smattering of applause followed him from the bunker and across the field where the Mercedes burned. Wand was an excellent teacher. In times past he had made an excellent terrorist as well. But he would never belong to the SS, and this fact was the one disappointment in his life.

***

Every bridge across the Elbe River was crammed with noisy throngs of Hitler Youth. Rocks and bottles, spittle, rotten vegetables, and bags of human excrement rained down on the decks of the freighter. These were Germany’s farewell gifts to the
Darien
Jews. This was the way the superior Aryan master race said good-bye to the subhumans of the Jewish race.

Mrs. Rosenfelt remained across the street from the horrendous scene as the freighter moved slowly past. In her hand she held a rose, the first hopeful rose of spring to bloom. She had plucked it from her garden this morning and had planned to toss it from the bridge to Maria. A foolish gesture, impossible with the hysterical mob shouting on the riverbanks. An old woman could not hope to swim against that tide of human debris to toss one small rose in the midst of the hail of filth. Bubbe Rosenfelt held tightly to the rose as she gazed sadly at the backs of the screaming Hitler Youth. She could only hope that Maria and Klaus had somehow managed to get the children safely below decks; away from the violence of the demonstration. The decks would be cleaned up easily enough, but the young minds of the little ones might hold such a terrible memory forever.

The old woman turned away. Cane in one hand, rose in the other, she marched quickly toward the Gothic arches of the huge Catholic cathedral that served the sailors of a thousand ports. From the building’s high bell tower, perhaps she could catch one last glimpse of Maria and the children.

The jeering voices rose to a fevered pitch behind her. She quickened her pace until the hard cobbles jarred her bones. Breathlessly she climbed the worn stone steps and pushed hard against the iron doors. Heavy as they were, they swung in easily on well-oiled hinges.

Her own breath echoed hollowly in the vast, deserted sanctuary. Straight ahead the marble floor stretched at least one hundred yards to an altar that once had been adorned with a crucified and bleeding Christ. Mrs. Rosenfelt remembered that Christ. Years ago the craftsmen of her factory had worked to repair the figure after it had fallen with the cross above the altar. She drew her breath in sharply as her eyes moved downward from where the cross had been. The swastika emblem and portrait of Hitler now filled the most prominent position in the nave. Scenes from the Old Testament had been removed from stained-glass windows.
There must be nothing Jewish here, no contamination in the Reich church!
The porcelain figure of Mary and the Christ child had been removed from behind the altar.
So this is what Frau Haefner had wept so loudly about!
Bubbe remembered the grief her beloved housekeeper endured when her church was desecrated by Hitler’s godlessness. Nazi banners hung from every arch, above each entrance to every alcove.