“Gaby!” She wheeled around. “What are you doing here?”
I was about to ask her the same question when Karl ran up. I stepped back. He wore the Brown Shirt and swastika of the German Student Association. “Ulla, no!” I called.
“I’ve got it, Ulla!” he cried out, smiling triumphantly.
She gave a cry and flung her arms around Karl’s neck. I didn’t understand what I was seeing.
“What? What is happening?” I asked.
“Gaby,” Karl said, turning to me, “what are you doing here?”
A fury suddenly roared up in me.
“What is anybody doing here?” I screamed.
“I am the captain of the third division of the Student Association.”
“You’re what?” I shouted in dismay.
“You don’t understand, Gaby,” Ulla said. “Karl just rescued Papa’s book. It took great courage. He did it for me.” Her eyes shone with tears.
“But you must be quiet,” Karl said, and put a finger to his lips. “This is our secret. I did it only because . . .” I didn’t need to hear the rest of the sentence. That was enough. The picture became very clear to me.
“You did it only because you got her pregnant. But why did you join, and become captain no less of the third division of the German Student Association? How many books did you bring to this fire, and to the other fire that I smelled on you, Karl? The fire in the Rhineland?”
“Gaby, don’t say that!” Ulla looked at me desperately.
“I’ll say whatever I want. I’m not a book. You can’t burn me!”
I turned and walked away.
chapter 35
Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
- Albert Einstein
The next morning when I returned to our apartment, I was surprised to see Uncle Hessie’s car by the curb. I knew I could not tell my parents about what I had witnessed last night. Mama and Papa would surely know about the fires on the Opernplatz. They were still smoldering and there were pictures of the blaze on the front page of every newspaper. But I would not say I had been there.
“Ah, Gaby!” Uncle Hessie came out of the apartment building. “We were about to drive by Rosa’s and pick you up.”
“You were? What for? Mama said I didn’t need to be home till nine.”
“This is the weekend your mama and papa planned to go to Caputh to plant the garden and open the house for summer, right?” So it was. Today was Thursday, May eleveth, and since I no longer went to school, I suppose my parents had decided to take advantage of the good weather and leave on Thursday morning rather than Friday night. “Run upstairs, dear. Tell your parents you are here. They wanted to get on the road early.”
“Yes, sure,” I said. Then I stopped and turned around. “But Uncle Hessie—where are the pansies?”
“The pansies?” Uncle Hessie looked momentarily confused.
“The flats of pansies Mama always buys to take up to plant.”
“Oh yes, of course, the pansies. They are already in the car.”
When I walked into the apartment I heard Papa shouting. I went right into the study. Ulla was collapsed in a chair, her face blotchy from crying. Papa stood over her shaking his finger.
“This is your last chance. You come with us! We beg you. We’ll take care of you and the baby.”
“I can’t, Papa!” Ulla shrieked.
“Ulla, he’s a Nazi!” Mama cried.
“Not forever, Mama. He says that Hitler won’t last.”
“That doesn’t matter!” Mama sobbed. “He is a Nazi. His family are Nazis.”
“He is the father of my child, Mama.”
Suddenly they all turned and noticed me. They stopped talking immediately.
“We’re leaving, aren’t we? We’re leaving Berlin,” I said.
“Just to Caputh,” Mama said weakly. But it was a pathetic attempt to lie.
“No, Mama. We’re leaving Germany. I know.” I turned to Ulla. “Come, Ulla. Please come with us.”
She got up and ran to embrace me. “I can’t, Gaby. I can’t. Please understand.”
I did understand. I understood that she didn’t really love Karl. She might have thought she loved him. But she didn’t. I understood that she was scared to raise the baby by herself even if Mama and Papa said they would help. There was a stigma to being an unwed mother. I knew all of this. I could feel it. I knew Ulla better than Mama or Papa. That is how it is sometimes with sisters.
No one told me I was too young to be a part of this conversation. In fact, Mama and Papa looked at me as if their lives depended on something I might say or do to change Ulla’s mind. But nothing could be said.
A few minutes later the just the three of us went down the stairs. Ulla stayed in the apartment. I suppose she knew it would be too hard to say good-bye outside, on the sidewalk. I led the way. I had to hold Mama’s hand because she was so shaky, and Papa was softly crying. Hessie knew immediately. There were no words needed to communicate the small tragedy that had just taken place in Papa’s study. He only said, “Don’t worry. I’ll look after her.” He put an arm around each one of their shoulders and hugged them. “Now, get in the car, all of you.”
I soon would discover that the car had been packed not with pansies but suitcases full of clothing that we never took to Caputh. Not shorts and bathing suits. Not holiday clothing, but clothing for everyday life. Mama had probably spent the evening before packing. That was why she was happy I had spent the night at Rosa’s. We headed not on Friederich Strasse toward Caputh but instead to the road that went north and west toward Holland. To catch an ocean liner to America, Mama told me. Where? To CalTech? To Princeton? The details weren’t important to me. I was too devastated to even think. I only cared about what I was leaving—Rosa, Baba, my sister—not what I was going toward.
I suddenly remembered my Diary of Shame. It was under my bed in the apartment. Maybe someday someone would read it. They might think it was why I left; that I was a better person than I am. But they would be wrong. I didn’t want to leave.
I watched Hessie’s eyes in the rearview mirror. There was an indescribable sadness in them. It was the despair of the unthinkable, the unutterable, that he was driving us away and we might never see one another again. They mirrored all our grief. Then I couldn’t look at those eyes any longer. I felt as if I were breaking in two.
I turned around in the seat and sat up on my knees, gazing out the back window. I could still see Berlin faintly, its buildings rising like a scratchy calligraphy, words in a sentence strung across a page. A page I couldn’t quite read.
historical figures
While many of the characters in this book are made up, some are real people. Here is background information on some of the historical figures Gaby encounters:
Josephine Baker was one of the first African American women to gain worldwide fame as an entertainer. A great beauty, singer, and actress, she was born in Missouri in 1906, moved to Europe, and became a French citizen in 1937. She was active in the French Resistance during World War II, for which France awarded her the military honor of the Croix de Guerre.
Vicki Baum, a bestselling novelist, was born to a Jewish family in Vienna in 1888. She wrote more than fifty popular novels, of which the most famous was People at a Hotel.In the early 1930s she traveled to Hollywood to supervise the filming of her book as Grand Hotel, eventually settling there and becoming a scriptwriter.
Arthur Eddington, a British astrophysicist, helped spread Einstein’s theory of general relativity through the English-speaking world. He was the head of the 1919 expedition to photograph the solar eclipse that provided one of the earliest proofs of Einstein’s theories.
Albert Einstein, the father of modern physics and best known for his theories of relativity, was born to a German Jewish family in 1879. He became a Swiss citizen in 1901, and much of his most important early work was done
in Switzerland. In 1914 he became director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin and professor of theoretical physics at the University of Berlin. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921. In addition to his scientific preeminence, Einstein was known as a humanist and a pacifist. In 1933, he moved with his family to Princeton, New Jersey, where he joined the Institute for Advanced Study.
Abraham Flexner, a Jewish educational reformer born in Kentucky, helped found the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and worked to bring over European scholars who were at risk from the Nazi regime, including Albert Einstein.
Paul Joseph Goebbels, one of Hitler’s most devoted supporters, was a skillful orator and a virulent anti-Semite. He earned a PhD in German literature, specializing in eighteenth-century Romantic drama. Following unsuccessful attempts to become an author, he used his talent for propaganda to become an important member of the Nazi Party, concentrating on attacks against the Jews. He became Hitler’s first minister of propaganda and enlightenment in 1933. He is famous for his declaration that if one tells a big enough lie, people will believe it. Although he was not a dwarf, he was sensitive about his appearance, since he was barely five feet tall and had a club foot.
Magda Goebbels, a beautiful socialite, was first married to the wealthy, much older industrialist Günther Quandt. After their divorce, she became involved with the Nazi Party, becoming close to both Goebbels and Hitler. Hitler was a witness for her marriage to Goebbels, and she acted as Hitler’s unofficial first lady. Just before the Nazis’ defeat, Magda and her husband poisoned their six children and then committed suicide.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, born in 1749, was Germany’s greatest poet, author, and philosopher. The Nazis tried to package him as a quintessentially German artist and adopted the title character of his Faust as an example of the ideal ruthless hero. However, since Goethe’s writing was not concerned with issues of nationalism and he opposed the dictatorship of thought, the Nazis had some difficulty presenting him as their true forerunner.
Heinrich Heine was one of Germany’s great Romantic poets. Born to a Jewish family in 1797, he later converted to Protestantism to help further his career. Even during his lifetime, his revolutionary political views made him controversial in Germany, and his writings were sometimes banned. His works were among those destroyed in the Nazi book-burnings. He was buried in Paris. When the Nazis captured that city, Hitler ordered his gravesite destroyed.
Wolf-Heinrich Graf von Helldorf, an ally of Goebbels’s and an SA leader, was notorious for harassing and robbing rich Jews. For personal reasons, he later turned against the Nazis and was executed for his part in a plot to assassinate Hitler.
Paul von Hindenburg, born in 1847, was a war hero during the First World War and became the second president of the German Republic. When he was eighty-four years old and in poor health, he was with difficulty persuaded to run for reelection because it was believed that he was the only candidate who could defeat Hitler. Hindenburg disliked Hitler; but being sick, tired, and somewhat confused, he was easily manipulated by the Nazis.
Edwin Hubble was an American astronomer whose work on star spectrums led to Hubble’s Law, which demonstrated that the universe is continually expanding. The Hubble Space Telescope is named in his honor.
Erich Kästner was an author, journalist, and satirist. Today he is best known for his children’s books, but during the Weimar Republic he was one of the most influential intellectual figures in Berlin. He was a pacifist and opposed the Nazi regime, but unlike many writers in his position, he could not bring himself to leave Germany. He personally watched his books being destroyed in the bonfire in Berlin. Although the Nazis prevented him from writing, and twice arrested him, he survived the war years in Germany and died in Munich in 1974.
Philipp Lenard, born in Hungary in 1862, was an influential physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1905 for his work on cathode rays. Some of his work overlapped Einstein’s. He resented Einstein’s being given credit that he believed should have been his, and grew increasingly suspicious of Einstein and his followers. He became committed to the idea of a pure German science that would be untainted by what he considered the false ideas of “Jewish physics.” He was an adviser to Hitler and became the Nazis’ chief of Aryan physics.
Franz von Papen, one of Hindenburg’s advisers, was appointed chancellor of Germany in May 1932. He advocated bringing Hitler into the government, believing that then the government would be able to control him. In order to gain the support of the Nazi Party, he lifted the ban on the SA and the SS. After he was forced by his enemies to resign as chancellor, he persuaded Hindenburg to create a new government with Hitler as chancellor and himself as vice-chancellor. He still believed he could control Hitler, but Hitler quickly turned against him and marginalized him.
Joachim von Ribbentrop was an ambitious social-climbing wine merchant. Although he was not a member of the nobility, he persuaded an aunt who had married a nobleman to adopt him so that he could add the aristocratic “von” to his name. As a friend of von Papen’s, he was able to assist in the maneuvering that made Hitler chancellor. He became Hitler’s foreign affairs advisor.
Leni Riefensthal was an actress and innovative filmmaker. A friend of both Hitler and Goebbels, she made the famous Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will in 1934. Although she was never convicted of any war crimes, she had ties to the Nazis, and her film career was derailed after the war. She lived to the age of 101, dying in 2003.
Friedrich Schiller, born in 1759, was one of Germany’s greatest poets and dramatists. The Nazis claimed Schiller as their prophet and tried to demonstrate that his plays supported Nazi theories. He became the most frequently performed playwright in Germany during the war years. Much of Schiller’s work, however, was a plea for liberty of conscience and could not be twisted to the Nazis’ purposes, and eventually Hitler banned some of his works.
Kurt von Schleicher worked his way up in the army to become a powerful politician behind the scenes. A friend of both von Papen’s and Hindenburg’s he was basically conservative but opposed the idea of a military dictatorship. After he broke with von Papen, he helped force him out of office and briefly became chancellor of Germany. Hoping to bring some unity to the government, he reached out to many parties, including the less extreme branch of the Nazi Party. However, after less than two months as chancellor, he was forced out and was replaced by Hitler. He and his wife were murdered in an assassination ordered by Hitler on June 30, 1934, in what became known as the Night of the Long Knives.
The above characters are real. However, three of the fictional characters in this book were based on actual people. Otto Schramm, Gabriella’s father, was modeled to some extent on the German astrophysicist Erwin Freundlich. An early supporter of Einstein’s, Freundlich led a 1914 expedition that hoped to confirm Einstein’s theory of relativity by observing a total eclipse of the sun in the Crimea. However, the expedition was derailed when World War I broke out, and he and his colleagues were temporarily imprisoned by the Russians. Freundlich did not participate in the 1919 expedition that successfully provided support for Einstein’s theory, but he was involved in later experiments involving relativity and the orbit of the planet Mercury. In 1933 he left Nazi Germany, becoming a professor in Istanbul and later in Scotland.
Baba Blumenthal was inspired by Bella Fromm, the social columnist for Berlin’s liberal newspaper Vossische Zeitung. Mrs. Fromm, or Frau Bella as she was known, kept a secret journal that was later published as a book titled Blood & Banquets: A Berlin Social Diary. She stayed as long as she could before fleeing the Nazi regime to the United States in 1938. She helped many other Jews escape by obtaining visas, money, and whatever else they needed to get out of Germany. She was born in Nuremberg around 1900 and died in 1972.
Uncle Hessie was based on the dashing Count Harry Kessler, a vibrant figure in Berlin between World War I and World War II. Born into an aristocratic Anglo-German family, he was a diplomat, publishe
r, and connoisseur of art. He was a friend to a glittering array of people from Albert Einstein to Josephine Baker. The count kept a diary that he began in 1918 with the Armistice that ended the world war and continued until his death in 1937, recording the agonies of his country during the rise of Hitler.
acknowledgments
People think of writing as a solitary endeavor, but in truth it is not. It is usually a collaboration between the author, editor, and the many others who assist in guiding writers to wonderful source materials. For this book especially I had the support and the insights of many people.
First I would like to thank Gerhard Kallman, professor emeritus of architecture at the Harvard School of Design. His memories of growing up in Berlin and attending the Humboldt University of Berlin were crucial to my understanding of what was happening at this time when Hitler was rising to power. He experienced it. He lived it and he left just before the most violent waves of anti-Semitism seized the nation. He read my manuscript not only for accuracy in terms of street names and shops that his family frequented but also for the more subtle elements such as the tone of dialogue between parents and children of the social and intellectual strata of the Schramm family. It was because of his acquaintance with Bella Fromm that I decided to create the character of Baba. He also on two separate occasions as a youngster met Albert Einstein. Gerhard shared with me as well his recollections of sneaking into the movie “palaces,” as they were called, to see Marlene Dietrich when he was still a lad in short pants. Professor Kallman was in Berlin on his way to a ski holiday the night of the Reichstag fire. “I went anyway,” he recalled. “I was just so happy to be finished with exams!” His recollections of these events and people animated the city for me. Luckily his family anticipated, unlike many others, what was in store for Jews and they left in 1934 for Switzerland and then some time after went to England, where he studied architecture.
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