by Elly Welt
“Well? Answer me.”
“Yes, Papa.”
“Other arrangements have been made.” he pressed his forehead between thumb and fourth finger. Dritt waggled his tail and blinked at me. I think he appreciated that I was willing to stand in line for hours at the pet store in Steglitz to get that foul-smelling meat for him and Mies. Even with all the basement windows open, one could smell the stink of the cooking meat.
“Because of the recommendation of your mathematics teacher at the Collège Français—to whom you must be grateful—the scientists at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute at Hagen have offered to complete your education.”
“But Papa,” I blurted out, “I would be of great help to Mutti if I could remain at home.”
“You don’t know what you are talking about. You are too young to understand these things.”
“But—”
“You are to be there before eight and report to Professor Avilov’s secretary.” He handed me the paper with their names. “You know, of course, who Professor Avilov is.” It was not a question, but a statement requiring no answer. He knew that Mitzka Avilov had been my good friend. Then came his stock admonition: “At all costs, avoid drawing attention to yourself. Remember what happened to your Uncle Philip.” He was through with me. Without another word he began to read from the legal briefs he held in his hand.
Mother and I retired to the kitchen. She, hugging her gray wool shawl about her, leaned for warmth against the huge coal-and-wood-burning stove. I, at the table, in my ski jacket, was eating my supper of cabbage and potato soup and trying to persuade her not to get up with me the next morning.
“Please, please, Mutti. I must leave the house by five thirty if I want to get there before eight. There is no need for you to get up that early.”
“You must promise to dress properly. A suit and a tie.”
“I will.” It was ridiculous. I would wear a clean white shirt, a suit and tie, but my underwear was all in shreds, my socks mend on mend, and I had no proper shoes and would have to choose between gym shoes or work boots. My warm Loden coat I had outgrown the year before and Mother wore it now to the factory. She dare not wear a fur. So I would wear my knickerbocker suit with work boots and my ski jacket, which was shorter than the suit coat.
“Your dark blue Eton suit—not the knickerbocker. And a clean white shirt.”
The knickerbocker was my favorite. It was pale blue wool gabardine, soft and roomy, with a long jacket belted in the back, and big patch pockets. “Mutti, it’s a science institute, not a fancy-dress ball.”
“Josef, I needn’t tell you how important . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“There is no need for you to get up with me. I promise I will wear a suit and a tie.”
“And a clean white shirt?”
“Of course.”
“Perhaps you should try the Loden coat?”
“Mutti, you know it doesn’t fit.”
She sighed. “I’ll make your breakfast for tomorrow, then.”
“I can do that. Please.”
But she turned to the stove and prepared my breakfast for the next morning: a thin slice of bread sparsely spread with a paste of margarine and yeast, which she placed on white china with a gold border, Limoges. I would make myself a cup of ersatz coffee in the morning. Then she packed my rucksack with two one-kilo loaves of bread, a small jar of the paste, and one half kilo of the Italian salami that smelled so strongly of garlic, which I was to drop off for Uncle Otto and Aunt Greta on my way home from the Institute the next evening.
At least once a week I took them food from our house and from the Central Market across the street from their apartment. My father was “German” and, therefore, Mother and I were considered “privileged,” did not have to wear the yellow star, and could shop at regular markets. Uncle and Aunt were both one hundred percent Jewish.
Mother tucked money—from my father—and some of our ration stamps for Uncle and Aunt into my rucksack along with the food, then turned to me. “Your father said that you would be given lunch at the Institute.”
I nodded.
Poor Mother. Her eyes were pleading. She left the warmth of the stove, crossed the kitchen, and rested her hand on my arm. Her arm was thin and white, her wrist transparent. I knew that she sacrificed herself to give me extra rations. As a physician she knew only too well that growing bodies need food. And then she delivered her usual speech which had nothing at all to do with any reality we were living. “My dear Josef,” she said, “I know you will behave at the Institute as a responsible and honorable boy and that you will do nothing unclean.”
Responsible meant not deflowering a virgin and not impregnating anybody. Honorable meant no sex, and polite manners. Unclean meant venereal disease. There was a history of maternal propaganda behind each term, the most impressive on venereal disease, which she reinforced with select pages from her medical books. Gonorrhea with its painful strictures and possibility of blindness was bad enough, but the big scare was the late stages of syphilis. One did not want to have a horribly painful or crippling disease of the spinal cord or to go completely insane. On a lighter note were the gumma, the hideous, pussy, running sores chronic to late syphilis. One could see people running about Berlin with gumma, and Mother never failed to point them out. Anyone with a lesion was suspect.
“Please don’t worry yourself, Mutti. I promise to wear a suit and a tie and to behave myself properly.”
It was still night at five thirty the next morning. I put my dish and cup in the sink, turned on the light, and felt my way down the dark hallway—past the dinning room, the two parlors, and the music room—and let myself out our front door, locking it behind me, then out the iron gate to the sidewalk. It promised to be a sunny day. The moon and stars cast light enough for me to see clearly. There were some tulips and hyacinths blooming in our neighborhood, but mostly one saw muddy ground with the remains of last summer’s vegetable gardens. Only a few bothered with grass now, the next-door neighbor, Von Chiemsee, for one. Our suburb had not suffered extensive damage from the bombing—a crater here and there in the yards and broken window glass replaced with cardboard, but only two burnedout houses, so far, on the way to the station in the village, Gartenfeld, where the only noticeable changes were a few boarded-up shops, the button lady’s for example.
Our next-door neighbor was quite upset when he’d gone into Gartenfeld one morning the summer before and found her and little Hans gone and the button shop boarded up. He rushed home and out into his back yard, saw my mother and me, and shouted, as was his habit, over the back fence.
“Frau Doktor, Frau Doktor!”
Mother and I walked over to the fence.
He carried a suit jacket in his hand. “Frau Doktor, I took this into the village to match the button.” He shook the jacket in her face. “I have lost one button and might as well throw it away if I cannot find a match.”
The button lady—Frau Levy—kept, in her little shop in the village, jars and bottles and boxes of old buttons and shelves and drawers of needles and pins in every conceivable color of thread. Little Hans was her grandson. His parents had been taken the year before.
“They have taken her away.” He was quite agitated. “Surely, she has done no harm to anyone.”
Von Chiemsee was a Baron from Bavaria. He was wealthy, kept many servants, and yet, for reasons which I could never understand, liked to mow his own vast grounds. This gave rise to the weekly summer conversation he would have with my mother over the back fence, until September 1942, when she was gone all day because of her new career, peeling potatoes seven days a week in a factory midtown.
“Frau Doktor! Good day!” he would holler.
She, neighborly, would march to the fence.
“If you would be so kind as to tell me which day you think would be best for laundry this week?”
“I think that tomorrow it might rain and that perhaps later in the week would be better—perhaps Thursday.”
“E
ven with the rain, one could wash, but I know that you would agree—I know my laundress does—that drying the sheets outside is of utmost importance.”
“I couldn’t agree with you more, Herr Baron. They smell so fresh.”
“Then if it won’t interfere with your drying, I will mow my lawn today before the rain.” He was too much a gentleman to mow his lawn when either his wet laundry or ours would be soiled, and, of course, he expected the same courtesy from us.
The Baron was a charter member of the Nazi Party and a total idiot. He ended each over-the-fence conversation by clicking his heels, throwing up his arm, and shouting, “Heil Hitler!” even though he knew my mother was a Jew. She never failed to start when he did this.
The station was one kilometer from our house—exactly twelve minutes. I timed it to catch the train originating at Zehlendorf, two stops before ours, so I could get a seat. That early the passengers were mostly working people dressed like clowns in ragged remnants, stinking and unclean. There was no deodorant, no dry cleaning, and little soap in the Third Reich. Locked into the small compartment with them and with the garlic perfume I carried on my back, I could hardly breathe, so I threw open a window. The wretched man sitting across from me shouted, “Shut it! Better warm stink than cold ozone.” So I closed the window and avoided taking deep breaths. Breathing through the mouth was no better, for then one could taste the stink as well as smell it.
“What is that pungent bouquet you carry?” Professor Avilov asked me as we continued down the corridor.
“Salami. Italian.”
“Hmmm. It’s not offensive, just strong. We’ll try Rare Earths.” We entered the lab of the man who had, earlier, directed me to the penthouse. The Rare Earths Laboratory was mostly storage closets with some worktables, and the man in the white lab coat seemed to be the chemist in charge.
“No, thank you, Chief.” He smiled at me. “Can’t use him.” He was smoking a cigarette.
There were two more laboratories in this second-floor wing. Both were biology. Both rejected me, but there was a wonderfully kind woman in charge of the first. She was plain, very much like my mother, but much younger—thirty or so.
The work in her small laboratory was highly specialized, the microscope unlike any I’d ever seen. She and her assistant sat across from each other at a narrow table, each able to look at the same time straight ahead through binocular eyepieces and perform some sort of surgery with a syringe under the objective.
Professor Avilov addressed her as Frau Doktor and asked if she needed help. She stood, looked at me, and said, “What is your name?”
A little bow. “Josef Bernhardt, Frau Doktor.”
“How do you do, Josef Bernhardt. I would like you to meet my assistant, George Treponesco.”
“How do you do.” I nodded at him.
“We are not planning to run a kindergarten here,” he said to me.
I found out later that he was Roumanian and a biologist.
“Ah, Josef,” said Frau Doktor, “disregard George. He is quite jealous of your strong and beautiful eyes and afraid you’ll be competition for the hearts of the pretty young girls.” She laughed and patted my rucksack. “Why don’t you take this off—and your coat. It’s quite warm in here.”
It was warm. The building was surprisingly well heated! I slid the rucksack off my back, and that damned Roumanian sniffed audibly at my Uncle Otto’s salami. I unbuttoned my ski jacket all the way but didn’t take it off, and Frau Doktor explained to me the work she was doing. Using a hypodermic syringe under the microscope, she would suck up a piece of larval tissue that would later be the eye of an adult fruit fly and transplant it into a genetically different larva. Then, by observing the developmental interactions between the host and the transplant, she might study genic effects on hormone-like materials. The larval tissue was called an imaginal eye disk, the mature fly an imago. She seemed a wonderfully kind woman.
Frau Doktor made the Roumanain Biologist stand up and let me sit in his place to look at the larvae through his microscope.
“Kindergarten,” he said again.
She ignored him and asked me, “Tell me, have you used a microscope before?”
“Yes, Frau Doktor.”
“Was it in school that you used one?”
“No, Frau Doktor.”
“Where then, Josef? Tell me.”
All this while Professor Avilov was pacing in his usual way, silent, and not missing a thing.
“I used my mother’s microscope. She is a physician.”
“Is it similar to this?”
“No, Frau Doktor, it is much different.”
“In what way, Josef, is it different?”
“It has a single eyepiece.”
“And in what other ways?” She forced words from me.
“The magnification is much higher. Also, it has an oil-immersion objective, allowing for a higher resolution.”
Then we discussed how a physician like my mother needed to have the higher magnification in order to count blood cells, to look at smears for VD, and so on. And she demonstrated to me how these microscopes with the binocular eyepieces, although of lower magnification, gave a stereoscopic view of the object, right side up.
She and I looked together through the microscope at the two larvae. She showed me how one takes them out of a slimy solution, puts them on a slide under the lens, and performs the little operation. I thought it mechanically clumsy, with much wasted effort, but, of course, I was much too shy to say this.
“When you know all about the Drosophila,” she said when I was about to leave the lab, “I would very much enjoy working with you. I think you would do well because you have steady eyes and a steady hand.”
I thanked her, bowed slightly, and shook her hand. Professor Avilov thanked her, bowed deeply, and kissed her hand. The Roumanian Biologist George Treponesco said, “Don’t forget your sausage, Kindergarten.”
All Roumanians are named George.
The next and last laboratory on the floor was huge, the rejection so humiliating that if there had been one spark of self-esteem left in me, I would have walked out.
Professor Avilov addressed the man in charge as “Dr Krupinsky” and asked him if he could use me.
“Tell me, fellow,” said Dr Krupinsky, “do you know a virgin from an ordinary female?”
The question embarrassed me, and I blushed.
Professor Avilov laughed. “He talks of virgin Drosophila.”
I shrugged.
Krupinsky said, “Or tell me, do you know what is a cubitus interruptus?”
I had read certain books.
“Wrong!” yelled this Krupinsky. “It’s not what you are thinking at all. Look it up in the dictionary.”
Nothing was worth this embarrassment. Were we to go through the entire Institute with an insult at each stop?
No, we were not. Professor Avilov headed back to the penthouse, I at his heels like a puppy. If he could not place me in Genetics, it looked as though he would not place me at all. So! He had given up.
“Fetch Max,” he said to Sonja Press, then strode into his private office and slammed the door shut.
“Why don’t you take off your jacket?” she said to me. “We have plenty of heat. And here”—she tugged at the shoulder strap of my rucksack—“give this to me. You don’t have to carry it around all day.” She put the rucksack and jacket in the corner behind her desk and then, before she ran down the stairs, she patted my hand. Her hand was warm. She was more than just attractive—quite pretty, really.
In the waiting room were books and journals. On her desk I found a dictionary of scientific terms and looked up cubitus interruptus. It meant “deficient venation in the wings.” Veins! Ha! The bending of Latin was as stupid as ever. Cubitus in Latin means “elbow”. So the elbow on a fruit fly is a certain vein on a wing. Why can’t they say vena interrupta, “interrupted vein,” instead of “interrupted elbow”? Latin. I detested it. Imagine a boy of nine forced to translate
from Latin to French and back again, knowing neither language. Seven years of it—just because of religious persecution. The Catholics threw the Huguenot Protestants out of France in 1685, and they fled to Prussia, where some tolerant archduke or other opened a gymnasium—a high school—for them in Berlin and put in the charter that French was to be its primary language.
I despised the languages, but not half as much as history, which was just distorted Nazi facts—propaganda—to memorize one day and forget the next:
The German Army was not defeated. The German Army was winning the First World War, but the Jewish-Bolshevistic Imperialists corroded the will to win of the home front and through such Jewish-Bolshevist agitators as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht inflamed the home front to knife the glorious German Army in the back. This will not be permitted to happen again!
Of course, it was out-and-out lies. The truth is that the German Supreme Command begged the Emperor on bended knee to sue for peace, to seek an immediate armistice in order to avoid a military catastrophe.
Had it not been for some of the Calvinist ministers who ran the school, my life would have been even more intolerable. They were Old Testament Christians who taught that grace is predetermined and who encouraged me to believe I might have it, perhaps confusing grace with survival, which, I found out later, is not at all the same. I turned to them briefly after Sheereen left and my father refused, absolutely, to take Mother and me away to Switzerland. I began to attend chapel and even confessed to the school chaplain, Herr Wäsemann, that if I were not so young—fourteen—and if only I could speak to people more easily, I might think about becoming a minister myself.
He was a gentle man who took this most seriously and talked to me about the prophet Jeremiah, who had insecurities similar to mine. “Oh, Lord, Lord,” Jeremiah was supposed to have said, “I am not fit to preach because I am too young.” And the Lord was supposed to have answered him, saying, “Do not say ‘I am too young.’ But you should go where I do send you and preach where I tell you.” Then the Lord stretched out his hand and touched Jeremiah’s mouth and said to him, “Hark! I will put my words into your mouth.”
