The Prosperous Thief

by Andrea Goldsmith

  The thug draws closer, Martin knows he will say anything to save his child. He holds her hard to his hip. The thug has stopped in front of them and Martin tells himself to smile, smile into the face of danger. Renate is stiff, if only she did not look so terrified, and Alice, well Alice is just watching.And now the thug is smiling, not at Martin but at Alice, and in that moment Martin realises he didn’t hear her call out. His daughter is safe.

  ‘How old are you?’ the man asks. And Alice, revealing an understanding of the situation that many adults don’t have, smiles back and tells him she is six. It’s the same age as his daughter, he says with a pat to her head. ‘And she has lovely long curls just like you.’ Another pat to her hair and he turns away, beckons to his mates and moves off.

  The old Jews are sprawled across the gutter, one is bleeding from his mouth. Two women, plain-dressed like Quakers, leave the crowd and attend to the men. The rest of the people disperse. Martin can’t think of the old men, only his daughter and how close she came to the knife. He and Renate put Alice between them, holding onto her tightly. As they head down the road towards Katz’s, he feels the knife ripping into his child, ripping into them too. They have to get out of Germany as soon as possible. Anywhere. Any way. Now. Before harm comes to them, his daughter most of all.

  They hurry down the main thoroughfare and turn into the smaller street where Katz lives. There they stop and both Martin and Renate kneel down to Alice’s height. They explain the dangers to her as they have so many times before, explain what brutes these Nazis are. They tell her she must never shout out like that again, she must never under any circumstances invite attention from Nazis. And it is not that Alice doesn’t understand – she does, all too well – rather she knows the men wouldn’t hurt her.

  ‘What? At six, you have intuition?’ Renate says.

  ‘What’s intuition?’ her daughter asks. And then a moment later: ‘They would have looked silly cutting a little girl’s hair in the middle of the street.’ And that is her final word on the subject.

  With Katz’s building now in sight she runs ahead of them. Martin and Renate pick up their nerves and follow more slowly.

  ‘She has to learn to be more careful,’ Renate says.

  And while Martin agrees, he doesn’t want her to be so careful that like her father she can’t breathe without fear.

  How best to protect his daughter from the SA and the SS? he finds himself thinking. Indeed, how to protect her from the entire military might of Germany? It is an utterly ludicrous situation. His daughter is only six years old. He looks at her running ahead, tiny in her neat navy blue coat, her legs thinner than his wrist, her feet much smaller than his hands. She’s just a child, he keeps saying to himself, knowing that many Germans see just a Jew.

  She has stopped in the doorway of Katz’s and is waiting for them to catch up. As they approach, her face opens into a smile, and Martin shoves his anxiety aside. The three of them enter the building together.

  This is not Katz’s restaurant as in the old days, not the huge timbered space filled with tables and noise and separated from the street by a wall of steamy windows, but Katz’s apartment building. When the restaurant was forced to close earlier in the year, Katz moved the business into his own home. It was fortunate for him that most of the other residents were Jewish and long-time patrons of his restaurant, for while some Jewish doctors have transferred their practices to their homes without complaint from gentile neighbours, a restaurant is quite a different matter.

  They walk up stairs worn concave from more than a century of feet. As they climb, Alice runs her hand over the delicate chill of the wrought-iron rose pattern, looking as always for the unicorn in the middle of every third panel. With each unicorn she makes a silent wish. On her very first visit here she missed a unicorn and a week later her grandfather was dead. Now her attention does not wander even for a second.

  Two floors up and they reach Katz’s apartment. The former dining and lounge rooms, both with high ceilings, huge chandeliers, heavy-framed paintings and an intricate frieze forming a band around the rooms, are crammed with tables. When his customers first came here, they took in the surroundings and accused Katz of overcharging them at the restaurant. Such grandeur, they said, such riches.And where, they would ask, are our chandeliers? Where our priceless paintings? And Katz as genial as ever would soothe them with sweet words and a sweeter muscat and soon they were settled to food and conversation with the same gusto as of old.

  There are few seats left by the time the Lewins arrive, yet the atmosphere is oddly subdued. Jews fill every available space with as many words as possible: as the old saying goes, two Jews, three arguments. But not today. There are newspapers spread on the tables and Herschel Grynszpan’s attempt on vom Rath’s life is the main topic. As they wait for seats, Martin and Renate listen to the conversations around them. Of major concern is the manner in which the attempted assassination has been reported and the consequent repercussions on Germany’s Jews. Of major interest is the identity of this Grynszpan and why he chose a nobody like vom Rath.

  ‘Of course it might have been a simple act of desperation,’ a woman seated nearby says.‘Look at his name. The reports say he was born in Germany, but the name’s Polish. I suspect all his family have been banished to that place just over the border – can’t remember what it’s called except it’s Polish and unpronounceable. A town where the Nazis have been transporting Poles who’ve been living in Germany.’

  ‘Zbaszyn,’ her companion says. ‘It’s called Zbaszyn and I hear it’s dreadful. Shocking overcrowding, and an epidemic of suicides.’

  ‘Exactly,’ the woman continues.‘Imagine how you’d feel if you just heard your family had been dumped in some godforsaken foreign hole. And for many of them it would be foreign. Some of these Poles have been here for generations. They’re as German as we are.’

  ‘I doubt that,’ the man says.

  The woman shakes her head.‘Forget your prejudices, Karl, just for a moment forget them and imagine how you’d feel if the children and I were imprisoned in some backwater, where if disease doesn’t finish us, despair will.’

  The Lewins listen and imagine and are grateful that between them there is not a single drop of Polish blood.

  ‘But a hundred per cent Jew,’ Renate says.‘So how lucky is that?’

  Martin is saved a response with the arrival of Katz. Hermann Katz is a short, rotund man with a glossy hairless head. Among Jews he is known as the funny man of Düsseldorf – although today, with his drooping features and solemn greeting, it is hard to believe and, under the circumstances, greatly regretted. For Jews need their comedians. Perhaps in biblical times when, apart from a strict and irritable Yahweh, the going was pretty good for Jews, they might have had little need for humour – certainly the Old Testament is not known for its laughs. But as soon as persecution began in earnest, with life swinging between despair and impending death, Jews seized on humour as a useful ploy for living with perpetual disaster. So it happens that in any Jewish community from Düsseldorf to Dresden there are jokes, and at any one time the latest joke.‘ Have you heard the one about – ?’ someone will ask, and whether you have or not you’ll listen, because with each retelling there are embellishments and improvisations which make the original joke funnier. God resides in the details as any Jew knows, so a joke that takes a minute on Monday will have inflated to five by Friday. By Sunday, listeners might think they’re listening to a novel, and a few days later the new joke will have sunk into the general swirl and another emerged as the latest.

  Katz was a legendary joke-teller, and as a very funny man many jokes actually originated with him. Hermann Katz was the reason why the Lewins chose to eat here today: with an appeal both to adults and children he was always good for a laugh. But there are no laughs today, not as he guides them across the room, nor when he seats them at a table. No jolly Herr Katz today, just the information with a mournful shake of his shiny head that he’ll be closing ear
ly.

  ‘This vom Rath business,’ he says, with a hand to his pate and polishing, ‘it’s not good for Jews.’

  ‘Surely it can’t get any worse?’ Renate says.

  Katz shrugs, nothing is for certain but he’s heard rumours.‘Go home when you leave here,’ he says.‘Go straight home.’

  Kristallnacht

  Over in Paris, Ernst vom Rath died that afternoon. Not that the authorities would have been surprised, as one of the bullets had ripped clean through his spleen, pancreas and stomach. A mere forty-eight hours separating wounding and death, but for an efficient people like the Germans who had already recorded the habits and whereabouts of every Jew in Germany and Austria, it was time enough to ensure a neat spontaneous outbreak of violence. Kristallnacht, such a pretty word: Crystalnight. Not Firenight. Not Deathnight. Not Truthnight. But Crystalnight. Death and destruction dressed up for the ball.

  When vom Rath’s death became public, the Lewins were travelling back to Krefeld, and by the time they arrived home, Amalie Friedman was full of the news. There had been sporadic violence against Jews since Grynszpan’s attack on Monday but now there was talk of serious and widespread reprisals. The reports on the wireless howled with shock and righteous anger; if this vom Rath had been Hitler himself it would be hard to imagine greater outrage. The Lewins began their cold supper with the wireless bleating in the background. But soon Renate was on her feet – such threats couldn’t possibly be good for the digestion, she said – and turned the machine off with force enough to dislodge the knob.

  They finished their meal in silence, and afterwards engaged in a flurry of activity as if that might ward off danger. But Martin’s reading, Alice’s puzzle, Amalie’s crocheting and Renate’s sketching neither filled time nor dampened their fears. As the night deepened, there was a tautness in the air and a rustling behind doors. It was felt in Düsseldorf as a background distraction, but in Krefeld it was an eerie threat, like living in the shadow of a smoking volcano.

  Most Jews in this region of Germany chose to live in the large, established communities of Düsseldorf, Cologne and Bonn, so there were only a few Jewish families in Krefeld, none of whom lived close to the Lewins. Two families, rebounding on rumours, had packed their bags and bolted west. They had business connections in Arnhem, and while they knew it would be risky at the border, hoped their Dutch colleagues would vouch for them. Martin thought it doubtful anyone would protect a handful of German-Jewish business acquaintances who were no longer in business, but kept his thoughts to himself. After all, when comparing the unknown risks of staying with the equally unknown risks of leaving, logic was no more reliable than hope and provided a good deal less comfort.Two families decided on flight and a reliance on strangers, while the remaining Krefeld Jews shut themselves in their homes with their wirelesses and telephones and waited.

  ‘How much revenge does this vom Rath warrant?’ Martin said. ‘How many Jews can possibly be punished?’

  He had left the table and was pacing the lounge from window to table and back again. He surged through the room, his overcoat flapping, his pipe jammed in the corner of his mouth. Back and forth he went, his tread heavy on the floor, and only when his coat clipped Renate’s easel, almost toppling it, did he realise the danger. The dull regular pounding of his shoes and the Fischers downstairs, and so little required these days to awaken the suspicions of good Germans. He stopped and dangled in the middle of the room, at a loss to know what to do.

  ‘Ring Erich,’ Renate said.‘He’ll have the latest news.’

  Erich Friedman, Renate’s brother in Berlin, had an ear so attuned to current affairs that he had once been depicted in a cartoon in the Jewish press as a human strain of telephone exchange. Over the past few years he had managed more than most Jews to maintain friends in high German places, good contacts with good information. Although not yielding much tonight as Martin discovered when he was finally connected. Yes, Erich had heard there would be violence, but more than that he could not say. Though it didn’t take a genius or a Jew to guess Hitler would use the vom Rath death as yet another springboard to put the Jews in their place.

  ‘You should rethink your visa applications,’Erich said to Martin.

  ‘Your preference might be for America or England, but you may find that Argentina or Shanghai prefer you.’And just before hanging up.‘Stay at home tonight. Make yourselves invisible.’

  How useless and defenceless one feels when waiting for certain but unspecified disaster. The criminal condemned to die knows what to expect and knowing can make certain choices: to go quietly or not; to conceal his emotions or not; to hang himself beforehand or not. But waiting for an unknown disaster is to be tortured by an imagination attuned to the worst. The best one can do in such a situation is toy with possibilities. So if the apartment were stormed Martin would deal with the intruders while Renate, Alice and Amalie would flee. And should there be fire, they would escape via the bedroom window, not because the fire-escape was close by but because the courtyard was poorly illuminated. And if Martin were summoned –

  ‘A dog receives better!’

  Renate rose so suddenly her chair fell to the floor. She’d had enough. She hated what was happening and she hated the Germans. But most of all she hated being Jewish: it had never done anything for her and now she was being persecuted for it. She grabbed their knapsacks from the sideboard, hurled them to the table and started to fill them. It was incomprehensible what was happening. Threat after threat, and incumbent on her, on Martin, on all the other Jews to shuffle the various dangers in order to determine what posed the greatest threat at any particular time. Would it be the Nazis at the door? Would it be the neighbours downstairs? Would it be the thugs in the street? What would be the major threat in the next five minutes? What in an hour’s time? So much threat, and all directed at them, at Jews, a people for whom violence extended no further than tossing a few words around.

  She yanked the straps of each of the knapsacks and carried them into the kitchen. Nazis on a rampage would rip into sideboards and credenzas, display cabinets and dressing-tables, they’d rip into upholstery and bedding, they’d rip into you, but the party fed them well so Jewish food held no interest. She tossed the bags in the bottom of the pantry, shoved them right to the back behind her largest jars of pickles, and slammed the door. The sound sheered through the still, grey room, and Renate, like Martin a while earlier, suddenly recalled the Fischers downstairs. She stood motionless in the kitchen, wrapped in the noise of her own bitter breathing. Anger, loss, betrayal, even fear, all were indulgences to be rationed in these contemptuous times; she felt bleak, chilled and empty: the emergency bags were packed and there was nothing left to do.

  And finally she acknowledged things would not improve, not today, nor tomorrow, nor in the foreseeable future. Oddly, this knowledge so assiduously avoided afforded her some relief, for when you accepted the worst, anything less meant not only were you ahead but you knew you would cope.

  Besides, there were others to consider. Her poor mother would sit for hours rigid in her corsets, her tightly waved hair framing a face set in stone. If you were to detonate that face, what an eruption of grief and disbelief would spill. Amalie Friedman, always so proud of being German, had a whole history to lose – had lost most of it already. Then there was Alice, her only child, whose past was thinner than a fingernail and whose future was day by day more fragile.

  Renate collected herself and returned to the living room. She sat in one armchair and Martin in another, both of them to wait out the long night. Amalie withdrew to her piano and brief improvisations in memory and hope before going to bed, while Alice slept fitfully on the couch. As the hours passed, Renate waited with Martin in a far from comfortable silence, for it was largely her fault they found themselves in this situation. Not that Martin would ever blame her, but the facts were clear. As early as 1935, before he had been forced to give up the business, Martin had wanted to emigrate. But Renate truly believed there was
time enough for such radical decisions, and a year later, with the brief spring surrounding the Berlin Olympics, she comforted herself on a decision well delayed. The remission was cruelly brief. The Olympic flame was hardly extinguished, and the voices of foreigners still fresh in memory, when the persecution returned more punishing than ever; the violence and humiliation too. But despite the increasing dangers, she still did not want to leave. Even when she saw how sublimely sensitive were the Germans when it came to humiliating Jews, how great their talent for Jewish vulnerability, she believed they could remain in Krefeld and still be safe.

  ‘We’re German,’ Renate would say. ‘What is there for a German in Palestine or America or God forbid Australia? If we were to settle in those places, settle properly and forever, we’ d have to stop being German.’

  ‘But we can’t be German here,’ Martin would say. And more quietly,‘Who would want to?’

  Now as she sits waiting for disaster during the long night of the ninth of November, Renate sees the future with bruising clarity and knows she would go anywhere.

  ‘Even Shanghai? Even China?’ asks Martin, naming the only place in the world without a Jewish quota.

  And Renate recalls the joke, worn thin after its marathon through German-Jewish circles, about Oskar Landau in China on Rosh Hashanah and wanting to attend synagogue. All around are temples and shrines and Chinese people going about their business. Finally Oskar stops a man dressed in traditional silk jacket and cane hat, a plait trailing down his back, and asks if there is a synagogue anywhere in the city. To his surprise he learns there is. ‘But what do you want with a synagogue?’ the Chinese man asks. Oskar explains he is Jewish, that today is the Jewish new year.‘Of course, of course. What Jew doesn’t know it is Rosh Hashanah,’ the Chinese man says. ‘It’s just you don’t look Jewish.’