EIGHT
Prague, 1939
Standing on Charles Bridge, Erich listened for the soft gurgling voices of the Vltava River passing beneath him but could hear nothing. It was as if it too had been silenced in sadness this day, like all of Prague, by the loud rumbling of German tanks moving slowly across the bridge above its flowing waters. It was a good day to be alive, if you were a Nazi.
Finally, Erich caught the faint noise of water rushing against and past the ancient stone pillars supporting the bridge. It was a sound, though louder, that for no particular reason thrilled Julia each time they came to the bridge together. It was always as if she had never experienced such a sound before as the river went by. “A river has so much to say, so many stories to tell, if we will listen,” she would say. “The voices from the bottom are deeper and different from the voices in the shadows on top.” At first he was amused at the display of such playful wonder from her; yet in time, the ritual of listening to the river’s voices became a separate moment in time for both of them, a moment when nothing else mattered except the joyous innocence of being in love. He was alone now with Julia gone, and the river had grown quiet, its eerie darkness now haunting him. Only the silence of an uncommon sadness could be heard rising from the waters. Prague had fallen.
Earlier in the day, Erich had journeyed to the Hradcany Castle hoping to catch a glimpse of Hitler, whom he had never seen. Standing behind a row of steel-helmeted soldiers, he watched, more in fear than awe, as Hitler exited his touring car and walked alone towards the massive open doors of the great castle. Shouts of “Sieg Heil” immediately rose from the Sudeten Germans like hosannas on high as he passed their frantic faces. At the door, Hitler stopped and turned, focusing his eyes on Erich’s face for a second, as if he knew him. But no smile came from him. Gods don’t smile, and at that moment Hitler had become one—a very modern god, but still of the ilk the ancient Germanic gods were in arousing the frantic passions of all who would look upon him. Erich felt it, too, but later he dismissed it as a moment of weakness, a moment when reason can be temporarily pushed aside by some unexplained emotion.
Darkness now covered Erich as he left Charles Bridge, walking slowly back to his apartment near the university. He had stayed too long thinking about Julia and where she might be. Approaching the Old Town square, waves of cheers from a huge throng massed around the statue of Jan Hus, the Protestant martyr, rang through the crisp night air. Standing at the edge of the square, Erich recognized several Sudeten German medical students and turned quickly up a side street away from the square towards the Carolinum of Charles University. The crowd was growing restless and nasty. Small groups began to tear away from the outer edges, racing madly around, smashing store windows and doors of several small Jewish shops facing the wide square. As the frenzy intensified, Erich wondered where the German soldiers were that had poured into the city all afternoon. Even now the distant strains of moving trucks and tanks could still be heard, and would be throughout the long night. Tomorrow would find a German soldier on every corner, but tonight belonged to a quickening madness.
Erich stopped when he heard the rapidly moving steps behind him and turned to face a group of hostile students and men shouting obscenities, rushing towards him thinking he might be a Jew. As they neared, one medical student recognized Erich and quickly silenced the virulent jeers of the angry mob now encircling him.
“He is a German, a medical student like I am, not a Jew. Look at his face,” he shouted above the howling men. “He soon will be a soldier for the Fatherland.”
Like hungry predators deprived of a kill, the mob growled and raced quickly on, hunting for another prey.
“We must follow them,” the student said, taking Erich by the arm, “lest they turn on you as an enemy of Germany.”
“I am a German citizen. How could I not be for my country?” Erich responded, looking incredulously at the student.
“You are seen by many students as a friend of the Jews—that is reason enough. Come with us, if you value your life tonight.”
Erich said nothing more and began walking with the student towards the chanting mob, which had gathered next to the Estates Theatre. Someone began singing “Watch on the Rhine,” and soon everyone joined in the rousing national anthem, including Erich. Singing for God and country cleanses the soul, his father had told him one Sunday morning many years back. Standing with his father and mother in Dresden’s St. John’s Lutheran Church, together they sang out Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” at a level that would have deafened the angels, and it thrilled him. His soul had been cleansed. He was singing for God. The same thrill surged through Erich as the crowd broke into harmony during the second stanza, and his lungs exploded with great gusto singing the patriotic words.
“Dear Fatherland, no fear be thine. Firm and true stand the watch on the Rhine,” rolled from his lips with such intensity that even God might tremble at its force. Then he stopped singing. An elderly Jewish man and woman were closing their small leather shop across the street from the theatre when several men broke from the crowd and raced towards them.
“Jews!” they cried. “Stop them!”
The crowd quickly followed, blocking the door to the store and forming two circles of screaming voices around the old man and woman. Erich was the last to cross the street and stood away from the outer circle but close enough to seem a part of it to others who might be watching him. At first, only venomous tongues shouting obscenities threatened the man and woman. Then, as if it were playtime in kindergarten, unnamed hands began to shove the helpless two Jews back and forth across the circle, slow at first, then faster until they collided with each other, falling to the pavement. Two men quickly yanked the man and woman to their feet to start the game again, but this time the man and woman fell apart from each other from exhaustion and lay very still. For a second no one moved as the circle grew smaller around them. One man, maybe forty in age, handsomely dressed in suit and tie, seeming very much like a doctor or lawyer, walked over to the old man and woman now sprawled out on their backs. Looking down on them, he paused for a moment, then spit twice on the man, striking him in the face. Others quickly followed, until the faces of the old man and woman were covered over with gobs and mounds of dripping spit and phlegm and smelly tobacco juice. The last of the crowd tried to urinate on the two old Jews but couldn’t as everyone roared in laughter. Frustrated, the man lashed out with his foot, kicking the old man in his side, then his head. Others joined then, kicking the man and the old woman, too, even stomping on their stomachs and then their faces. Only the old woman cried out at first, but grew quiet like her husband when the toe of a shoe shattered her temple and eye socket, flinging the eyeball to the pavement beside her. Laughing, the guilty man calmly picked up the eyeball and placed it on the sealed mouth of the now dead woman. Silenced by their own violence, the rabble began to disperse, each feeling giddy with the murder of the old man and woman.
Erich remained standing alone for a few minutes in the dark shadows of the street until the mob was gone, ashamed at what he had witnessed and not done. He had made no effort to interfere with the killing of the old man and woman, nor had he wanted to. An unrelenting fear had seized him earlier, when he faced the crowd mistakenly shouting the same obscenities at him as they had the old man and woman. Kneeling down in the blood still draining from the two mangled bodies, filling the cracks in the sidewalk beside him, Erich lifted the arm of the old woman and then the man, searching for a pulse, but found none. Julia’s face flashed before his eyes, and then the faces of her parents. At the right moment on a given day, they could have been the shattered bodies lying dead before him.
It had come to this, as Julia’s father knew it would, though perhaps sooner than expected. God would be beseeched tonight by a thousand angry voices and more, asking where He was in all of this. Perhaps the old man and woman did, too, Erich thought, standing and wiping the blood from his hands on his trousers.
He had been too occupied to hear
the small police KdF-Wagen pull up beside him in the street but turned immediately when the car door slammed shut. Still clad in a Prague police uniform, the officer nodded to Erich and walked slowly over to where he was standing, looking first at Erich’s bloody pants and then the two lifeless bodies.
“Pretty bad sight, huh?” Erich said nervously to the officer in German.
“You did this?”
“No, no, some wild men did who ran away. I was trying to see if they might still be alive, that’s all.”
“What is your name?” the officer asked brusquely.
“Erich Schmidt, and—”
“From Prague?”
“No, Dresden. I am a medical student at the German university here.”
“Dresden, you say?” the officer asked, noticeably changing the rough tone of his voice to a more pleasant manner.
“Yes, my father is Dr. Schmidt at Berlin University.”
“You have papers, I assume?”
“At my apartment. We can go there—”
“That won’t be necessary,” said the officer, returning the small notebook to his breast pocket. Then, after slowly circling the bodies, he stopped and squatted down, looking intently at the old woman’s face and the eyeball resting on her lips.
“You don’t see that kind of mess every day, do you,” he said, pointing to the poor woman’s bloody, caved-in face.
“I guess not, but we see a lot of bad things over at the hospital,” Erich responded, feeling more at ease now with the change in the officer’s demeanor.
“Do you know who they are, anything about them?”
“No, nothing.”
“Jews, would be my guess,” the officer said, abruptly turning away from Erich and walking back to his car. “We’ve seen a lot of this today.”
“Are you just going to leave them here?”
“Why not? Let the German patrols deal with the old man and woman. They’re running the show now.”
“German patrols?”
“Yes, curfew checks. The Gestapo put them in this afternoon. They’ll run from ten at night to seven in the morning. I’d forget about the dead Jews and get home,” were the last words Erich heard as the officer sped away.
Staring for a second more at the mangled bodies, Erich wondered if they might be kin to Julia. They would be gone in the morning, taken to the morgue for claiming. But what if they had no kin, no one to wish them well into the next world? He was disturbed at the thought. A pauper’s grave, or a cadaver for the medical students to fish out of a tank to carve on—this was all that was left for them. No one, except maybe God, would ever know they were here, or even existed. They had become a statistic for future historians to fool with, that’s all.
Before leaving, Erich stood looking at the deserted streets facing him. Faint sounds of mechanized vehicles moving somewhere over distant roads could still be heard, but that was all. Quickening his pace, he crossed an empty roadway through downtown Prague and turned up the street leading to his small apartment at the end of a side alley. Once inside, he lit up a half-smoked cigarette, sat down on his bed and cried, much like when frightened as a child. But no one was there to hold him as his mother would do. Shaken by the horrors of the evening and the unrelenting fear he felt, he lay back on the bed, staring at the ceiling, trying to work through all that had happened. Even though he was only a German student in Prague, his relationship with Julia had been too open for the world to see. Besides, he had been warned. At this time in history, a Jew and a German were like opposite poles of a magnet, never to embrace. But he had tried to, and that was his sin before the authorities. With the Nazis in control of Prague, the Nürnberg laws would soon hang heavy over the city, turning many of its people against all Jews and those that befriended them. Erich sighed. Returning to his studies at the medical school here in Prague was no longer an option. Instead, he would assume the much-copied role of the prodigal son of old and go to his father in Berlin to seek reconciliation with him. There the prestigious wings of his father would carry him far in finishing the final semesters of his medical studies at the great Berlin University. Then, in time, he would find a way to escape Germany as others had, and go to Julia in England where his world would be right again.
***
A Perfect Madness Page 8
