Lilac Girls

by Martha Hall Kelly

  Tante Ilsa paid for most of my medical school costs. A kind praying mantis of a woman, tall and gentle with a head too small for her body, she’d been left a great deal of money by her mother and used it sparingly, no matter how Onkel Heinz brayed.

  Heinz smiled, causing his piggy eyes to disappear into the folds of his fat face. “Oh, don’t worry, Ilsa. They probably are dead by now,” he said.

  The patrons turned away, but I knew he was right. If Ilsa was not careful, her own considerable belongings would end up there alongside the Jews’. The gold cross around her neck was no protection. Did Ilsa know what Heinz did in the refrigerated room? Perhaps on an instinctual level, the way a calf knows to become restless on slaughter day.

  “You shed a tear when the Jew Krystel’s shop closed, Ilsa. My own wife a Jew friend, shopping at the competition. That is loyalty, nicht?”

  “He has those baby hens I like.”

  “Had, Ilsa. It doesn’t help my business when this gets around. Soon you’ll be on the Pranger-Liste.”

  I held my tongue, but I’d already seen Tante Ilsa’s name on the Pranger-Liste, the public list of German women who shopped at Jewish stores, posted about the town, a black stripe running diagonally across it.

  “You don’t see Krystel’s wife in here,” Heinz said. “Thank God. And no more Frau Zates, either. Wants a cabbage but will only pay for a half. Who buys half a cabbage? I cut it, and who buys the other half? No one, that’s who.”

  “Why should she buy whole when she needs only half?” Ilsa asked.

  “Mein Gott, she does it on purpose. Can’t you see?”

  “Keep your thumb off the scale, or you’ll have no customers, Heinz.”

  Mutti and I left Heinz and Ilsa to bicker and walked along to the sale at the platz. It was rare Mutti had any time to shop, since she was up at five-thirty each day to do mending before she cleaned houses or worked in the shop. Thanks to the Führer’s economic miracle, she was working fewer afternoon hours but still seemed just as tired at day’s end. She took my hand as we crossed the street, and I felt her rough skin. I could barely look at her dishpan hands, red and peeling from cleaning toilets and dishes. No amount of lanolin cream could heal them.

  People gathered in the square to watch as Wehrmacht soldiers threw household items into great piles and displayed finer items on tables. My pulse quickened as I approached the heaps, sorted according to use and gender. Shoes and handbags. Crates of costume jewelry. Coats and dresses. Not all the finest styles, but with a little hunting, one could find the best labels for next to nothing. That elevated Mutti’s mood, and she started a pile for us.

  “Look, Chanel,” I said, holding out a red hat.

  “No hats,” Mutti said. “You want lice? And why cover your hair, your best asset?”

  I tossed the hat back on the pile, pleased with the compliment. Though my shoulder-length hair was not white blond, many would have considered it honey gold in the right light, a good thing, since every German girl wanted blond hair, and the use of peroxide was discouraged.

  We passed a mound of canvases and framed pictures. A painting of two men embracing lay on top, the canvas spiked through on a spear from a sculpture below.

  “My God, Jew art,” Mutti said. “Can’t they just hang a calendar on the wall like the rest of us?”

  On his way home from the pharmacy, Father joined us there by the piles. The creases on his face looked deeper that day. A rough night on the sofa.

  I lifted a scrapbook from a table and flipped through the pages, past black-and-white photographs of someone’s beach vacation.

  “This is undignified,” Father said. “You two call yourselves Christians?”

  Of course he disapproved. Why had he even stopped to speak with us? I tossed the scrapbook on our pile.

  “Anton, can you not relax a bit?” Mutti said.

  I pulled a painting, one of two of grazing cows, out from under a crush of framed canvases. It was well done, perhaps even a masterwork. Traditional German art. Just what the Propaganda Ministry found suitable, and something every cultured woman should own.

  “What do you think, Mutti?”

  Mutti pointed at the cows and laughed. “Oh, it’s you, Kleine Kuh.”

  Kleine Kuh was Mutti’s nickname for me. Little heifer. As a child she’d had a brown cow that I reminded her of. I had long ago dealt with not being as dainty and blond as my mother, but the name still rankled.

  “Don’t call Herta that,” Father said. “No girl should be called a cow.”

  It was good to have Father’s support, even if he was a lawbreaker who listened to foreign broadcasts and read every foreign newspaper he could lay hands on. I took the two paintings and set them in our pile.

  “Where have the owners of all this gone?” I asked, though I had a general idea.

  “To the KZ, I suppose,” Mutti said. “It’s their own fault. They could have stepped aside. Gone to England. They don’t work; that is the problem.”

  “Jews have jobs,” Father said.

  “Ja, of course, but what jobs? Lawyers? That is not really work. They own the factories, but do they do the work? No. I’d rather do ten jobs than work for them.”

  Mutti pulled a dressing gown from the pile and held it up. “Would this fit you, Anton?” Father and I didn’t have to see the silver K on the sleeve to know who the former owner was.

  “No, thank you,” he said, and Mutti walked off, scouting the piles.

  “Are you sure, Father?” I took the dressing gown and held it out to him. “It’s a nice one.”

  He took a step back. “What has happened to you, Herta? Where is my girl with the tender heart, always first to take up the collection can for the neediest? Katz was a man you could have learned from.”

  “I haven’t changed.” It was obvious he didn’t support or even like me much, but did he have to broadcast this?

  “Katz was compassionate. A doctor without love is like a mechanic.”

  “Of course I’m compassionate. Do you know what it’s like to be able to change a person’s life just with these hands?”

  “You’ll never be a surgeon with Hitler around. Can’t you see that? Your generation is so pigheaded.”

  Much as I hated to admit it, he was right about the surgeon part. As one of a handful of women in my medical school, I’d been lucky to be able to study dermatology, never mind surgery, and had received only basic surgical training.

  “We all must sacrifice, but Germany’s changing thanks to my generation. Such poverty yours left us with.”

  “Hitler will be the death of all of us, just taking what he wants—”

  “Quiet, Father,” I said. How dangerous for him to respond in such a way in public. He even told jokes about Party leaders. “Hitler is our hope. In no time, he’s gotten rid of the slums. And he must take. Germany can’t thrive without room to expand. No one will just give back the land we’ve lost.”

  Many parents had grown wary of confronting their children for fear of being denounced by them, but not my father.

  “He’s killing Germany to feed his own vanity.”

  “This war will be over within weeks. You’ll see,” I said.

  He turned with a dismissive wave.

  “Go straight home and rest before afternoon coffee, Father.”

  He walked away, barely avoiding a passing tram. Father would need a nap. The cancer was having a party in his body. Could Katz have helped him live? It was no good wasting time with such thoughts. I busied myself searching the piles for medical books.

  Mutti hurried to me. “I found rose-scented soap…and a toaster.”

  “Don’t you worry about Father, Mutti? He’s going to be denounced. I can feel it.”

  Though my parents were both products of German blood and could trace their pure German ancestry back to 1750, my father could not hide his lack of enthusiasm for the Party. He still put his traditional striped German flag in our front window next to Mutti’s new red Party one, though Mu
tti was always moving his to a side window. No one noticed it in the sea of swastikaed flags hung outside every building, but it was only a matter of time before someone turned him in.

  “Ja, feind hirt mitt, Herta,” Mutti said. The enemy is listening.

  She pulled me closer. “Don’t worry about that, Kleine Kuh. Focus on work.”

  “I’m allowed only dermatology—”

  Mutti pressed her fingers into my forearm. “Stop it. You’ll be working with the best and brightest soon. You can go all the way.”

  “Someone needs to rein Father in.”

  Mutti turned away. “What will people say if we have these things in our home?” she said, shaking her head at the toaster in her hand.

  We paid for the items we’d chosen: the toaster, the scrapbook, the paintings, and a mink stole with the glass-eyed heads still attached, a luxury item Mutti was willing to risk lice for. The soldiers threw in a doctor’s framed diploma Mutti said she’d use to display her Aryan blood certificate and some canvas running shoes for me. All for only ten marks. We seldom had bread to toast, and Mutti could not afford to go anywhere she could wear such a mink, but the smile on her face made it all worthwhile.

  —

  I WAS HAPPY TO HAVE those new running shoes for a sleepaway trip I was chaperoning the next week at Camp Blossom, a camp situated in a pine forest half a day’s train ride north of Düsseldorf. It was run by the Belief and Beauty Society, which was affiliated with the BDM, the Bund Deutscher Mädel or the League of German Girls, the female wing of the Nazi Party youth movement. The Belief and Beauty Society was for older girls only, to prepare them for domestic life and motherhood. This sleepaway trip was intended to transition the younger ones into the organization, and my job as unit leader was to look after the girls in my cabin—not an easy job.

  Unit leaders received day assignments, and I was sent to the craft hut, a blatant mismatch, since I considered painting amateurish watercolors and weaving gimp lanyards a complete waste of time. Plus, my considerable talents lay outside the art world. With my extensive medical training, I should have been running the camp health clinic, but one serves where one is needed. At least the hut looked out over the lake, which reflected the reds and oranges of the trees surrounding it.

  Pippi, another girl assigned to work the craft hut, joined me there one afternoon. I’d known Pippi since we’d both joined BDM, and though she was a few years younger than I, we were good friends, well on our way to being best friends, something every other girl seemed to have. Pippi and I had done everything in BDM together. Earned our badges and leadership cords. Taken turns carrying the flag in at meetings. At the camp we shared meals and even tidied up the worktables in the craft hut together.

  “Let’s hurry,” I said. “It’s about to rain.”

  Pippi took the scissors from the tables and plunked them into the metal cans around the room. She was terribly slow about it.

  She nodded out the window. “Look who’s waiting.”

  At the edge of the woods, two boys stood, one blond, one dark-haired, next to a rowboat pulled up onshore, a deep rut in the sand behind it. I recognized them, unit leaders from the adjacent boys’ camp, dressed in camp uniform khaki shirts and shorts. They were part of the boat crew. Handsome boys, of course. No camper of low racial value was allowed at any German youth camp, so everyone was attractive, guaranteed to be racially pure. There’d been no need to measure our heads and noses with calipers and craniometers. We’d all submitted pure genetic histories.

  They fiddled with the boat’s oarlocks, taking glances back at the craft hut.

  “You know what those boys want, Pippi.”

  Pippi checked her face in the mirror above the sink. Next to it a poster fixed to the wall with tacks read: REMEMBER YOU ARE GERMAN! KEEP YOUR BLOOD PURE!

  “So what? I just want to try it. It’s fun.”

  “Fun? We can’t finish a relay race here without couples heading for the woods.” What fun was a race if no one won?

  At Camp Blossom, the staff were encouraged to look the other way if Aryan couples paired off. If a pregnancy resulted, the mother was sent to a luxurious SS spa-clinic, and the birth of a healthy child was celebrated, no matter if the mother was married. All this focus on children was understandable, of course, since the future of Germany depended on populating our country. But with my sights set on becoming a physician, I could not afford a pregnancy. I slid a pair of scissors from one of the metal cans and secreted them in my shorts pocket.

  Pippi’s eyes widened. “Ever done it yourself?” she asked in a casual voice.

  “It hurts, you know. And no matter what they say, if you have a baby, you’ll be sent out of the BDM, shipped off to Wernigerode. The middle of nowhere.”

  Pippi pulled a stack of postcards from her shorts pocket. They featured views of Die Mutter-hauser des Lebensborns, a stately chalet. One showed a nurse tending to a ruffled bassinet on a tree-lined terrace under the SS flag.

  “They say it’s like being on holiday—the best of everything. Meat. Real butter—”

  “Maybe, but the father will not be involved. Once the child is born, they take it away to be raised by strangers.”

  “You throw a wet blanket on everything, Herta,” she said, fanning herself with the cards.

  Once the boys finished fiddling with the boat, they stood, hands in pockets. I tried to stall, waiting for them to leave, but eventually we had to go.

  Side by side, Pippi and I started down the path to our cabin. We turned, saw the boys following us, quickening their pace, and Pippi bit her lip into a smile.

  “Hurry,” I said, pulling Pippi by the arm.

  The boys picked up speed and Pippi and I took off toward the woods. I left the path and crashed through low brush and briers while Pippi, an accomplished sprinter, lagged behind. As I ran, the sting of the scissors’ point stabbed my leg. Why did this make me feel so oddly alive?

  I ran around to the far side of an abandoned cabin next to a rushing stream and crouched on the mossy bank. Catching my breath, I set my scissors down and examined the wound on my thigh. It was a surface wound but had produced a startling amount of blood. Despite the sound of the rushing water, I heard the boys nab Pippi.

  “You run so fast,” she said, laughing. The three clambered into the cabin, and I brushed away the jealousy I felt. What would it be like to kiss such a good-looking boy? Did I need to tell my supervisor if Pippi succumbed?

  “What a good kisser you are,” I heard Pippi say.

  I heard the creak of the bedsprings, more giggling from Pippi, and then moans from one boy. Where was the other one? Watching?

  Pippi put up embarrassingly little resistance, and I heard them breathing hard and loud. How could she?

  “You can’t keep your clothes on,” one boy said.

  “It’s so dirty in here,” Pippi said.

  I crouched there motionless, for any move would reveal my position. Pippi seemed to be enjoying it all, but then she had a change of heart.

  “No, please,” she said. “I need to get back—”

  “It’s not fair to get this far—”

  “You’re hurting me,” she cried. “Herta!”

  Friends help each other, but I’d warned her. Why hadn’t she listened? Her lack of discipline was a weakness.

  “Help!” Pippi cried. “Someone, please—”

  Aiding her would only endanger me, but I couldn’t leave her in that situation. I took up the scissors, cold and heavy, and stole to the rotted cabin steps in the almost darkness.

  The screen door lay on the ground, off its hinges, so the doorway provided a good view. There were many rusted metal beds in there standing on end, and Pippi lay on the only horizontal one. It had collapsed, the mattress ticking stained and torn. One of the boys was lying on top of her, his ass blue-white in the dark room, smooth and hard and pumping as she cried. The second boy, the dark-haired one, stood at the head of the bed pinning Pippi’s shoulders.

  I stepp
ed over gaps from missing floorboards into the cabin.

  “Stop it,” I said.

  The second boy lit up when he saw me, perhaps hoping for a chance himself. I brandished the scissors, a dull silver in the dark room.

  “She’s serious,” said the dark-haired boy. He released Pippi’s shoulders.

  The blond one slammed himself into Pippi with renewed vigor at the prospect of her backing out.

  I stepped closer. “Get off her,” I said.

  “Let’s go,” said the dark-haired boy.

  The blond pulled himself off Pippi, grabbed his shorts from the floor, and left with his friend, both avoiding my scissors. Pippi just cried there on the mattress. I untied the bandanna from my neck and placed it on the bed.

  “You can use this to clean yourself,” I said.

  I left her and walked outside to make sure the boys were gone. Satisfied they were not coming back, I walked to the stream. I raised the scissors and felt for a handful of my long hair, pulled it taut, and cut. Every muscle relaxed with that release, and I continued, feeling for any stray lock, until my hair was cropped to less than a thumb’s length all around. I tossed my hair into the river and watched it travel downstream, sliding over rocks, off into the darkness.

  I helped Pippi back to our cabin. With much crying, she thanked me for rescuing her and admitted she should have followed my advice. She promised to write once she got home to Cologne.

  Pippi’s parents retrieved her the next day, not at all happy, if their abrupt manner was any indication. I watched her leave, as she waved through the rear window of her parents’ car, my one friend gone.

  For the rest of my stay, I kept my scissors close, but in the end my self-cut hair did the trick, and boys let me be. When the sleepaway trip concluded, half of my cabin went home fingers crossed, hoping to have a baby, while I left camp happily without a fertilized egg.

  1939

  Once Hitler invaded Poland, mild foreboding turned to genuine panic at every New York consulate, and all hell broke loose at our office. To make things worse, Washington tightened visa restrictions, and it became almost impossible to enter the United States from Europe. France limited its visas as well. By November, people desperate to be at the head of the line braved the cold and slept the night under the stars in sleeping bags beneath my office window. Once we opened in the morning, the line of French citizens desperate to get home often snaked out from our reception area into the hallway.