The Prosperous Thief

by Andrea Goldsmith

  Dora joked, but with silence on their own visas she was worried. Her sister, Hannah, was married to an Oxford don. Dora knew she would sponsor the family, but she and Erich and most adamantly Willi had believed their future lay with Palestine. They had also thought, perhaps naïvely, their chances for Palestine would be strong. So they hadn’t sought Hannah’s help. But now Dora was wondering whether she should.

  ‘All this German red tape,’ Renate said one evening.‘Why are they making it so difficult? It’s clear Germany doesn’t want us.’

  ‘And neither it seems does the rest of the world,’ said Willi, his face pressed into a wry smile.

  For all her efforts Renate had little reason to hope. Yet day after day she persisted, channelling her energies into an exile which continued to terrify her. And through it all she tried to be a step ahead of the dangers that pockmarked her days. One afternoon when walking home from the Palestine Office with Dora, she saw approaching on the same side of the road three SS men just like those who came the morning her mother died. Closer they came, young men with the same blond features and the same clenched-fist demeanour as those responsible for her mother’s death. And closer still, and it was the same three, she was sure of it, the very ones who killed her mother, just twenty metres away, now fifteen metres, now ten. The rest of the world fell away. Renate saw only the killers. She’d fight them, she’d fight with her bare fists, all rage and muscle she’d kick the life out of them, her mother’s killers now nine metres away, now eight, now seven. She stopped in their path, Dora was pulling at her, Dora didn’t realise who these men were. Renate shook her off. Five metres, four metres, and she’s ready, oh yes she’s ready. Come on, killers, come on. Two metres, one metre and now passing. And they’re not the ones. They’re someone else’s brutes not hers.

  Dora was frantic. ‘What are you doing?’ she said. ‘What on earth are you thinking of?’

  Renate couldn’t speak. Only later when they were safe at home and preparing the supper did she tell Dora about the three SS men who were not the ones who killed her mother.

  Hunted and hunting all at the same time, concocting a set of convincing lies for this official, a slightly different set for another, and hoping she was on the right track but never quite sure. And although Dora’s involvement with the Jewish community meant she was among the first to know where next to direct their efforts when the last avenue had fizzled out, three weeks after Renate’s arrival in Berlin, the two women acknowledged they were no closer to obtaining their husbands’ release or of leaving Germany.

  It was late in the evening of another long day, and all too easy in the dark and cold to succumb to a longing for times past.

  ‘I’d love a glass of muscat,’ Renate said.‘And a foot bath.’

  ‘How about a cup of hot water and a cushion instead?’

  Renate smiled as Dora pulled out one of the couch cushions and propped it under her feet, then headed for the kitchen.

  While Dora was busy with the kettle, Renate settled back into the armchair and closed her eyes. It had been a hellish day. She must have walked close on ten kilometres, much of it through sleet and bitter wind. She had been home for more than an hour but still she was cold and all of her hurting, legs, back, arms, head, even her jaw, and not a scrap of energy remaining even if her life depended on it. Although of course that wasn’t true, not with Martin still incarcerated. Her kind, amenable husband and not of a nature to rise to the extreme challenges of these times, how she feared for him. And now the familiar fist at her throat, and tears riding on the fear, and just as quickly she squeezed the tears dry and swallowed hard. Terror, desperation, anguish like you were being disembowelled, and you have to keep it down, keep it quiet. Can’t afford to feel a little because the little inflates and soon it swamps and you can’t look after your daughter, you can’t look after yourself, can’t remain strong enough to engineer your family to safety. And it is up to you, up to all the wives and mothers to deal with the officials, handing out bribes like cakes at a party. Up to you to obtain the visas that will save your husband and your family.

  Up to you, she now told herself, and by the time Dora returned with two cups of steaming water, was composed again. The urge to survive is bottomless, she was thinking, and despite how bad you feel, there’s always a grain of energy left to excavate. She sat with Dora sipping her water while they planned their schedules for the next day. More letters to write, more phone calls to make, more embassies to visit, more functionaries to plead with, more Germans to fear.

  It was Willi who first learned of the Kindertransport scheme. Apparently British Jews were providing the necessary finance to transport German and Austrian children at risk to safety in England. And Willi was at risk. His father was political and so was he, and soon his age would put him beyond the scheme and directly in the sights of Germans wanting to do their best for the Reich.

  But Willi didn’t want to go to England, not under any circumstances.‘It’s clear what the English think of us,’ he said, slamming his fists against the table.‘If not for the English we’d be in Palestine now.’

  Dora had just that morning been to the Palestine Office on Meineckestrasse, her fifth futile visit in the past two weeks. She was quiet but firm.‘There’s no time left for waiting.’

  Willi was now on his feet, a stringy youth all jitters in the cramped flat.As he spoke the sun caught the pale fuzz on his face. ‘The visas will come through any day now, I know they will.’

  His mother was brusque.‘You know nothing of the sort. None of us do.’

  Palestine, Willi kept saying, they’d worked so hard for Palestine, it was the only place for Jews. But Dora had already made up her mind. She put through a long-distance call to her sister and brother-in-law in Oxford, while Willi kept repeating that he wouldn’t go and no one could make him. Dora put an arm around her son’s shoulders.

  ‘England now,’ she said quietly,‘doesn’t mean England forever. And given Palestine is British territory, you might well find England provides a quicker route than does Germany.’

  Willi was still arguing when the call to England came through. He stood stiff and glaring while his mother explained the situation to her sister. It was no longer a matter of taking the whole family, she said, rather there was a scheme to get children out, children who would need to be sponsored and provided with a home once they arrived in Britain. Hannah relayed the information to her husband, and in less than a minute Hannah and Jonathon Moser of Oxford, England, had agreed to sponsor Willi and take him into their home for as long as required.

  ‘And Alice too?’ Dora said.

  Renate was immediately out of her chair and protesting, but Dora, already engaged in a robust accounting of Alice’s qualities, ignored her. Such a mature child, she was saying to Hannah, and no trouble at all. Wise beyond her years, quiet, academically inclined, blessed with the Friedman flare for art, and would slip into Oxford life as if she had been born to it. Besides, she had nowhere else to go and no future if she stayed.

  ‘We simply can’t predict what will happen here,’ Dora said to her sister.‘But Hitler is adamant his Germany will have no Jews.’

  A little more persuasion and she must have convinced, for suddenly she was detailing the Kindertransport sponsorship procedure: who the Mosers would need to contact at the London end, the documentation required, the importance of speed given the worsening situation in Germany. She wound up the phone call in a profusion of gratitude, replaced the receiver on the hook and turned to face the music.

  ‘How could you?’ Renate was holding tight to Alice.‘She’s my daughter.You had no right.’

  And Willi:‘How could you? It’s my life.’

  Dora rehearsed the impossible answers before speaking. She started with her son.‘Unless you leave Germany you’ll have no life.

  It’s as simple as that. Of course you want Palestine, but Palestine is taking fewer and fewer of us. And while you’re waiting, you could well find yourself in Buchenwald
like your father.’ She put her arm around him but he shrugged her off. ‘You’re going, Willi, and the sooner you accept it the better.’

  Then she turned to Renate. She was brief. When you hear a wavering on the end of the phone, when you know that if given time your sister may decide a six year old is too much for two fifty year olds who know nothing about children, and your English brother-in-law may conclude he’s already encumbered with quite enough of things German, you press on, desperate not to lose the opportunity.

  ‘Alice has no future here,’ Dora continued.‘No Jew does. Even if Hitler and his National Socialists were defeated tomorrow, too much damage has already been done. It’ll be years, if ever, before Germans will feel comfortable around us.’

  This same thought had occurred to Renate but she had quickly brushed it aside: too terrible to think that once having left Germany she might never return. Now she forced herself to consider that bizarre phenomenon whereby a perpetrator of wrongdoing through some extraordinary twist of logic comes to resent and eventually blame the victim. She had seen it in certain bad marriages when the philandering husband turns his resentment on his patient and forgiving wife, blaming her for his reprehensible behaviour. And in commerce too, when gains were made dishonestly and the person who benefits resents the one who was cheated.

  People don’t like to be reminded of their wrongdoings, it introduces conflict into a character otherwise at ease with itself. Renate knew Dora was right, that when all this was over, Germans would want to forget their foray into barbarism, or at least convert it into something justifiable. They would not appreciate the presence of Jews to remind them of the truth.

  So it happened that by the close of day, both Willi and Alice were registered for the Kindertransport. Willi’s chances of being accepted were, they believed, good given his age, his own political activism and his father in Buchenwald. Alice was less of a certainty despite Martin’s incarceration; however, Renate and Dora believed her chances would be increased if she were partnered with Willi.

  ‘It won’t be for long,’ Renate said to Alice.‘And soon we’ll all be together, you, me and your father, probably in England –’ she and Dora had checked their applications at the British Passport Control Office last thing that afternoon, ‘but if not England, somewhere safe.’

  Thus she reassured her young daughter, herself too, all the while wishing Martin were here to share the decision and take some of the pain.

  They then settled down to wait. The first Kindertransport left Berlin early in December with most of the two hundred children being boys of Willi’s age and circumstances. So, too, for subsequent transports. Renate despaired Alice would ever be chosen and at the same time despaired she would. It was a terrible cruelty to send your child away, to plan for it and work hard that it may happen, knowing you’ll miss her like your soul has been wrenched out of you. Each time a list was posted, Renate would search for her daughter’s name, sickened by the same distressing brew of hope and loss. And when her name was not on the list, an even worse brew of joy that Alice was not leaving and terror of what might happen if she remained. She would see the relief on the other mothers’ faces and think:Why not my daughter? What must I do to save my daughter? And soaking through her a sense of foreboding, a sense that the worst was still to come, a sense that the last Kindertransport to depart really was the last.

  Several times Dora rang her sister in Oxford.Was she sure she had done everything required of British sponsors? Would she contact Bloomsbury House just to make sure all the papers were in order? Yes, contact them again, for until the travel permits arrived from England there was little chance of Willi or Alice being included on a Kindertransport list. And there were daily visits to the headquarters in Berlin to gather with the same panic-stricken parents waiting to ask the same questions of the same community workers who said they were doing all they could. Every day the same distressed parents, some quietly nursing their fears, others loudly accusing the workers of favouritism, everyone acting as if their children were more important than all the others. Selflessness, Dora and Renate soon learned, was counterproductive in a time of crisis. It was a harsh but simple fact that when survival was threatened there was a hierarchy, and those you loved were on top.Within a week, Renate and Dora were as pushy as the other parents. But without travel permits it was useless.

  In January, within two days of each other, Martin was released from Sachsenhausen and Erich from Buchenwald. In a mere eight weeks, Erich, long known as Papa Bear to his family – Dora was Mama Bear – had shrunk to a fraction of his normal size and had aged ten years. His face was a mess of sharp, grime-filled wrinkles separated by patches of tight, grey skin. He and Martin compared notes on food, shelter and treatment by the guards. Sachsenhausen won hands down.

  ‘I’ll book in there next time,’ said Erich.

  Erich had suffered diarrhoea for the entire eight weeks, and would never, he said, rid himself of the stench of his own excreta. In the camp he was forced to rise hours before dawn, drag his rancid body out to the mustering ground to line up with the other prisoners on the freezing asphalt. Aching, starved and silent he would stand while roll call was conducted with bullying slowness, all the while cursing his loose bowels. Should anyone want to go to the latrines – although never want, always need – he was more likely to be punished for asking, rather than given leave to go. The clock above the watchtower totted up his pain, fifteen minutes, forty-five minutes, one hundred and twenty minutes, slow-motion time yet the only movement in the grim morning. And throughout the long bleak days of chill and dust quarrying stones for Hitler’s new Germany, the same punch punch punch of pain.

  Some of the Kristallnacht Jews at Buchenwald had been put to work in the latrines. At first Erich had counted himself fortunate to have been spared what was indisputably the worst of the camp labour, but as his bowels rebelled he was no longer so sure. Soiled all the time and with precious little water, if he had the choice of water to clean himself or relieve his thirst, he would drink and hope he stank no worse than anyone else. Although the guards, all of them such experts in humiliation, were quick to remind that every last one of them was shit.

  ‘Belongs in an abattoir,’ a young guard had said about Erich. ‘Not that his carcass is fit for eating.’

  Physically Martin had fared better than his brother-in-law, but in other respects his suffering had been worse. Every facet of human functioning had taken a beating in the camp. Kindness, respect, selflessness, caring for others, all those qualities necessary when strangers were thrown together, were soon under threat.

  Most of the men at Sachsenhausen had been incarcerated since Kristallnacht, and by the time Martin arrived many were sick and weak. In his barracks there was one man whose wounds had become septic. Martin tended the wounds using his own allocation of water and bandages made from his own underclothes. The man needed more food than the usual prisoner rations in order to regain his strength, so Martin gave him some of his food, and initially he managed to persuade a few of the other men to part with a little of theirs. But soon he was caring for the man alone. And when the man eventually died, no one thanked him; even the man himself had blamed Martin for prolonging his agony.

  Weakness was dangerous in the camp, and too often kindness was seen as weakness. Of course men would look after family members, and friends would look after friends, but when you’re starving and cold, when your life trembles on a tightrope, only a fool is a good Samaritan, or so one of the other prisoners said of Martin. Gradually it dawned on him that goodness in the camp was a bit like a tub of water in the middle of the desert, and he too began to dry up.

  The cold bored into him, his stomach shrieked for food, kindness was washed away along with the diarrhoea. And through it all, the incessant cruelty of the guards, most of them members of the Death’s Head Squad of the SS. They were the basest of beings, true barbarians, as far as Martin was concerned. And so young, many of them not much older than Willi, and chilling to see boys,
their values not yet fully formed, behaving with such savagery. Martin would watch them puff themselves up and stride around like young sadistic gods, so proud in their uniforms, the ghastly human skull on their collars.

  ‘You’d never dare look them in the eye,’ Martin said one evening soon after he was released.‘So the skull, I always imagined it was my skull, always seemed to be staring at me.’

  ‘They’ve thought of everything,’ Erich said. ‘Train men in the art of brutality while they’re still young and receptive, and in time there’ll be an entire population willing to torture and kill on command.’

  The same thought had occurred to Martin while still in the camp, but he had kept it to himself. These were Germans after all, his countrymen. Could he, Martin Lewin, be capable of the same violence if exposed to similar training? The question plagued him as he saw how brutality flared randomly like sparks from a fire. It was as though the German reverence for order was being deliberately sidelined to allow the guards to express whatever primitive violence lurked within. Let off the leash, away from their families and without any civilising restraints, these young fellows were running wild. Martin would see them look around to make sure they had an audience before they laid into some poor fellow. He would watch a group work together, each taking turns to thrash an inmate until they’d thrashed the life out of him. It was a lesson in pack mentality, each man gunning his performance to greater extremes. Sachsenhausen taught him there were no certainties about human behaviour, and no limits to human brutality.

  Martin and Erich spoke little about their experiences, they wanted to protect their families and they wanted to forget. Although it was easy to surmise from the almost indecent alteration in their appearance and behaviour. Erich spent hours every day on the toilet. He could be heard groaning behind the closed door and sometimes the voiceless gasping of a grown man crying. And sniffing, always sniffing at himself. It was different for Martin. Winter dug its heels in earlier than usual, according to Martin, and saved its worse for Sachsenhausen. He hovered around the stove and Erich around the toilet, and now and then they would talk in whispers to each other as they regained their health.