A Master Plan for Rescue: A Novel

by Janis Cooke Newman

  Herr Gloeckner’s boots clicked around to the back of the car. The trunk creaked open.

  A packet of coffee landed near my feet.

  “Do not overestimate your abilities, Jew.”

  • • •

  Two months later, Rebecca and I woke freezing in our bed, wondering how it could be so cold inside our flat, how we could feel so little warmth beneath our blankets. At first, we thought it was the cold that had woken us, then we heard the breaking glass. The sound was coming from everywhere in the city, everywhere at once. And if you did not think about what it could be, what it might mean, it was the most beautiful sound in the world, as if the air was coming together and making diamonds and they were falling from the sky. Because what else could it be? What else could be catching all that light in the middle of the night? That light suddenly appearing all over the city, flickering in the deep dark of November in a city so far to the north.

  But this was Berlin, and November nights in Berlin did not give Jews diamonds falling from the sky. What we would get was broken glass, and fire, and revenge for a German embassy official shot in Paris by a Polish Jew who was going to make the rest of us pay for his moment of madness.

  We would learn later that it was cold because the city officials had turned off the gas. Turned it off to all the Jewish businesses and Jewish neighborhoods before they went out to break the glass and set the fires. Because they did not want there to be any explosions. Could not risk burning anything that belonged to them. Then they christened the night—Kristallnacht. The Night of Broken Glass.

  Rebecca and I wrapped ourselves in the cold blankets from our bed and went to the window. But there was nothing worth breaking on our street and all we could see was the flickering of firelight behind the dark shapes of buildings. All we could hear was the terrible and beautiful sound of breaking glass.

  “So much fire and not a single siren,” Rebecca whispered. “They are going to let everything burn.”

  She began pulling on sweaters and woolen pants. I wanted to throw myself on her and keep her inside. It would have taken nothing because she had so little strength by this time. But she would have left me for good the moment I let her up, so I started dressing with her, neither of us speaking, because what was there to say?

  Rebecca was stuffing film into the pockets of her coat, all the film she had, which was dangerous. If a member of the Gestapo saw her taking photographs, he would confiscate any film as property of the Third Reich.

  “Give me half,” I said to her, “in case one of us is luckier than the other.”

  I do not know how we did not end up beaten or dead, or sent off to Sachsenhausen, the concentration camp the Nazis built in my hometown of Oranienburg, like so many other Berlin Jews that night. Maybe a piece of Pietr’s luck was following us, for we roamed the city as if someone had cast a protective spell over us.

  In Charlottenburg, the Fasanenstrasse Synagogue was on fire. This temple that had once held seventeen hundred worshippers under its dome, where the Byzantine archways and Majolica floor tiles had made even the undevout feel like God was watching out for the Jews. We stood before it in the cold and watched flames roar into the sky from its arched windows, as if Hell itself had forced its way through those Majolica tiles, Satan coming to claim the famous temple, shut these past two years by the Nazis.

  “God has left this place,” said a man still in his nightshirt.

  “God has left Germany,” said another man, who against all wisdom was wearing a yarmulke.

  “Why not go with him?” replied a woman in furs. The boy at her side—too young to be awake and out of bed so late at night—was throwing rocks at the temple’s windows, though all of them were already broken.

  Everywhere we went synagogues were burning—the famous and the small. All with fire licking out of their windows, as if the man in the nightshirt and the man in the yarmulke had both spoken the truth. God had abandoned his temples and Satan had come to claim them, and when he finished, we would be next.

  Rebecca and I went west, into Gruenwald, where rich Jews had built big houses they believed would protect them, but had only made them more conspicuous. Outside one of these houses, a woman wearing only a nightgown made of lace against the cold was being pushed out her door by a group of grinning SA men. The woman appeared stunned, as if she was asleep with her eyes open, or as if she wished she was asleep. Her hair, as long and shining blond as an American movie actress, was so knotted at the back, it looked like it was hurting her scalp, and there was blood smeared on her thighs. A man—her husband, maybe—came stumbling behind her. The center of his face was mashed, as if it had been repeatedly punched. More SA men followed the couple out of the house, their arms filled with wine bottles and oil paintings. One SA man dropped a polished mahogany radio on the ground and cursed as he bent to pick it up. I wondered if the radio would turn up in my shop, and what I could ask in exchange for its repair.

  Then Pietr’s luck—or whatever it was that had been protecting us—ran out. The SA man who had been carrying the radio straightened, glanced into the darkness, and began shouting. And I knew we were no longer invisible.

  I pulled on Rebecca’s arm, because she was still shooting pictures, still doing what Pietr would have done. “We have to run,” I told her.

  We went running down the street, but when I heard the SA man’s boots behind us, I pulled us off the road and into the yards of the houses the rich Jews had built to protect themselves from all the terrible things that have happened to Jews throughout history. The terrible things they did not realize they could not protect themselves from. Not by money. Not by staying away from politics. Not by anything except not being a Jew.

  On the soft dirt in the yards of those doomed Jews, I could not hear if the SA man was close behind us or some distance away. If he was close, he would have known exactly where we were by Rebecca’s breathing, which was hoarse and ragged and asthmatic-sounding. And according to both of her former doctors, not doing her much good, as her heart had lost much of its ability to push air into her blood. I knew that if I made her run for much longer, it would kill her before the SA man did. I cut around a row of hedges and pushed Rebecca into the dirt behind them. Then I threw myself on top of her and prayed that the SA man would be too deaf to hear Rebecca’s wheezing.

  Maybe Pietr’s luck had found us again. Or it is possible that the SA man decided that catching two Jews with nothing more valuable than a camera full of photographs was less profitable than paying more calls on the big houses of the rich Jews of Gruenwald. Either way, we lay behind the hedges until Rebecca’s breathing quieted, with nothing to disturb us except the cold and the distant shouting of SA men.

  From Gruenwald we went to the center of town, where the big windows of the Jewish-owned department stores on Tauentzienstrasse and the Kurfürstendamm had been shattered and all the glass counters and display cases inside smashed into a thousand pieces. It was deserted now, and we peered through the empty windows to see headless mannequins scattered among the shards of glass like the victims of a bomb blast, their dismembered limbs lying in the wreckage far from their torsos.

  On the sidewalk, Rebecca and I stood ankle-deep in broken glass and it was cold enough to believe we were standing in ice crystals. I know I wanted to believe we were standing in ice crystals. She was shooting pictures—the mannequins, the looted display cases. I put my hand over the lens of her camera, and she gazed up at me.

  I moved the Leica away from her face and took her hand.

  “You should have worn gloves,” I told her.

  Even in the colorless light of the moon, her fingertips were blue. I put her hand in my pocket, all the film that had been there now shot.

  “I want you to marry me,” I said. “Even if it’s only for a short time, I want one thing that feels permanent.”

  She shook her head, but she left her hand in my pocket.


  “It will be easier to talk about a dead girl you once knew,” she said, “than a dead wife.”

  I wanted to break something, but of course, everything around me was already broken.

  “You cannot let me have this?”

  She touched the side of my face. It was like being touched by ice. “I am letting you have something.”

  A few months later, when the Nazis passed a decree requiring Jews to turn in their gold and silver, Rebecca said, “See, I was right about not marrying. Now they cannot make us give up our wedding bands.”

  • • •

  Rebecca was right about all that was happening in Germany. More right than I was. I do not know if it was her bad heart that gave her this clearer sight, as if her limited time in the world granted her a sharper sense of it. Or if it was only my willingness to ignore what was going on around me, as if I wished to prove Herr Brackman correct when he claimed some people will refuse to see the truth, even if you put it on the front page.

  The news that the Nazis had marched into Czechoslovakia appeared on the front page of every newspaper still being printed in Berlin that March. Rebecca had read the entire story to me when I returned from the shop, whether I wished to hear it or not. It was the first springlike day of the year, but she had lit the stove and was wearing a heavy sweater and a woolen shawl.

  “Hitler claims he has gone into Czechoslovakia only to protect the Germans who are living there.” She wrapped the shawl closer around her shoulders. “But you know he intends to have the world.”

  “The world will stop him.”

  “So far, no one has tried.”

  She did not say it, but I knew Rebecca meant it was time for me to leave. That it was only a matter of weeks before the Führer did something that would at last wake up the world, force England, or France, or possibly the Soviet Union, to declare war on us, making it too late for anyone—Jewish or not—to get out of the country.

  But Czechoslovakia was far away and the newspapers—under the control of the Ministry for Enlightenment and Propaganda—insisted that Hitler was not preparing for war.

  Although the celebration of Hitler’s birthday—five weeks later—might have looked like preparation, if we could have seen what we had been told were tanks and soldiers marching up Unter den Linden, the street where I had fixed Rebecca’s bicycle in a pouring rain. But we could not see them. Since Kristallnacht, Jews had been forbidden to walk on that street. Just as they had been forbidden to walk on Wilhelmstrasse, and Hermann-Göring-Strasse. Just as they had been forbidden to enter any theater, movie house, concert hall, museum, swimming pool, sports arena, and exhibition hall.

  But Hitler would not allow anyone to ignore his birthday—even Jews—and he filled the April sky with Messerschmitts. Still I did my best to ignore it, shutting the window against the spring air, putting a Duke Ellington record on the gramophone and playing it as loudly as the machine would go, trying to drown out the roaring of those engines in the sky above Kruezberg. But Rebecca pulled me from my chair, dragged me to the window and flung it open, made me stand in front of it. And when I wouldn’t look up, she put her hands on my face and tilted my head, forced me to stare at the blue April sky being blocked out by the dark underbellies of bombers, rows of them making it look like the sky itself was moving and we were being left behind.

  Then she took me outside, made me walk until we were a block from where Unter den Linden joined Universität—which was as far as Jews were allowed—where we felt the rumbling of Hitler’s tanks moving up the tree-lined street we used to think of as ours, felt it deep in our bones, as if the Führer was demonstrating his power over us from a distance. The blocks around us were filled with people waving red flags with black swastikas, but I do not believe any of them were Jews. All the Jews of Berlin were hiding in their houses—our birthday present to the Führer. I wanted to be one of them, but Rebecca was moving through the side streets toward the forbidden Unter den Linden, and I could not let her go alone.

  We squeezed our way through the cheering crowds on the wide avenue. On the ground, Rebecca found one of the red and black flags, and put it in my hand so I wouldn’t seem conspicuous. She kept her camera in front of her own face. All around us, happy Germans threw flowers and waved flags, and shouted, “Heil Hitler,” too preoccupied with the miles of rolling tanks and soldiers on horseback to notice the Jews in their midst—the pale woman in the sweater taking photographs, and the man who could no longer ignore what the Führer had in mind for his birthday celebration next year.

  • • •

  The next day when I returned from the shop, the flat felt as if a hole had opened up in it and I knew Rebecca had left me.

  She had taken everything that had belonged to her. The wool felt beret I had never told her was too big for her head and all of her photographs. All except one print of the old woman with the shriveled leg. That she had left on the kitchen table next to my passport.

  “So this is how you will do it. You will leave me first.” I sent the words echoing into the hole that had opened up in the flat.

  Rebecca had left me one other thing, although she had probably forgotten about it. A photograph of herself.

  I had taken it the summer I began collecting favors from Nazis. It was a warm day, and Rebecca and I were picnicking on one of the yellow benches in the Tiergarten, sharing a quarter-kilo of French pâté—courtesy of a motorcycle with a temperamental engine that belonged to a high-ranking SA officer. I am certain it was a trick of the sunlight, but for once, Rebecca looked flushed, as if there was blood running beneath the flesh of her cheeks, and I wanted a photograph of it, proof maybe that she would be with me longer.

  I had had to make her swear to develop it, and even then, she would print me only one copy.

  “Hide it somewhere, or I will throw it out.”

  I had hidden the photograph between the pages of Das Kapital, because Rebecca would never search for it there. She thought Karl Marx was tedious.

  I could have looked for Rebecca, but I did not think I would find her. I could have turned one of my favors into having the Gestapo search for her, but even if they found her, I knew she would leave me again. Instead, I sent a message to Herr Gloeckner letting him know that a Peugeot engine of his automobile’s exact make and model had recently turned up in my shop—actually, I had had it for months—and that while it was in poor repair, I was confident I could get it into even better condition than the one presently inside his vehicle. I then mentioned that the SS St. Louis would be departing Hamburg for Havana in three weeks’ time, and that it would be carrying approximately nine hundred Jews lucky enough to be in possession of one-way tickets and Cuban visas.

  Herr Gloeckner sent a message back that he would like to test this new engine before going to the inconvenience of troubling the Cuban embassy. I replied that as I did not wish to overestimate my abilities, I would wire him the location of the new engine once I was safely in Hamburg with my ticket and Cuban visa, reminding him that if I failed to deliver on my promise, it would be no inconvenience for someone of his standing in the party to have me arrested there.

  Fortunately, Herr Gloeckner’s fondness for his French automobile exceeded his dislike of Jews. A first-class ticket for the SS St. Louis and a Cuban visa arrived within a week of my message.

  I took the last possible train to Hamburg before the St. Louis was set to sail, thinking maybe Rebecca would change her mind, even when I knew she wouldn’t. Still, at the railroad station, I stood on the platform until the conductor stopped to ask me if I was getting on or not, and if I was, then I had better hurry up and do it.

  • • •

  In Hamburg, we were made to wait in a big wooden building known as Shed 76 that sat at the end of the docks. It was a building of no windows, and it was damp. And the way it was bleak, and how the Gestapo officers looked at our Jewish passports made me think that when we were
finally let through the door, we would not be walking up the gangplank of a pleasure boat bound for Havana, but into a boxcar headed toward one of the concentration camps we had only then begun hearing about. Concentration camps with the names Dachau and Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald.

  The St. Louis is a lie, were the words going through my mind, while a square-headed Gestapo officer examined my documents. It is only another way to make the Jews pay for their own extermination. For why would the Nazis send nine hundred Jews on a one-way pleasure cruise to the Caribbean?

  “This is a first-class ticket.” The square-headed Gestapo officer took in my frayed woolen trousers and no-longer-white shirt. It had seemed a waste to turn a favor into new clothes.

  “It was arranged by a ranking officer of the Nazi Party.”

  “First class?”

  I stood myself straighter. “Are you questioning Herr Gloeckner’s judgment?”

  The square-headed officer made me open my suitcase and rifled through my belongings—shirts, trousers, socks, underwear. He found Rebecca’s photograph of the woman with the shriveled leg and held it close to his small eyes.

  “I know this place.”

  “It is the plaza outside the Dietrich-Eckart-Bühne amphitheater.”

  “This is government property.”

  I let him have it. Let him, because I still had the photograph I’d taken of Rebecca that warm day in the Tiergarten. It was folded in half and tucked into my sock because I had noticed how Nazis were reluctant to make Jews take off their socks, as if they believed the rumor that we possessed hooves like the devil.

  When he gave me back my suitcase, I went to sit on the wooden benches beside the other Jews who were hoping that the St. Louis was not a lie. It was not much after that the shouting started.