by Bodie Thoene
Lucy considered the warning and the growing life within her that would soon enough lead her to her own imprisonment at Lebensborn. The thought of gaining weight made her cautious about eating. She only nibbled at the vegetables and did not eat the roast at all. And tonight, for the first time ever, she refused even a taste of Sachertorte.
***
Homemade British leaflets in support of the immigration of child refugees dominated the conversation over dinner at the Führer’s table. BBC broadcast appeals to the British people had brought minimal public response, and the Führer was convinced that the hypocrisy of the English leaders ran in the grain of the common people. No one wanted a homeless, filthy tribe of paupers invading their cities and homes. This effort, he insisted pleasantly, would fail like all the others.
“The voice of dissent is always stronger than the voice of weak Christian charity. And this is what makes our race strong. We are the only people on earth who are not swayed by the weakness of this false mercy. Let the English talk and weep and plead! Those idiots! What is the difference?”
Himmler picked at his vegetables and remarked. “It is a pity we have emptied out the insane asylums, yes? We might have sent them ten thousand imbeciles in answer to their leaflets!”
The guests laughed at the idea. “Let the English hypocrites see how far their mercy extends when it comes to drooling idiots, eh, Himmler?”
It was too late to speculate on such a marvelous practical joke. The do-gooders did not seem to have room for healthy children, let alone inferior ones. The German institutions had been cleaned out, but it would have been a great joke to send over a batch of imbeciles and cripples to these whining English nannies.
There was, of course, a slim possibility that some British aid might be extended to refugee children. If that was the case, Himmler said sternly, steep fines would be levied on the parents of such children and they would leave the Reich without so much as one mark tucked into their shoes!
This information would no doubt slow the beating hearts of compassion and silence the criticism. Mercy would put on a more practical face and show up this sentimental nonsense for what it was.
The Führer based his actions on the basic premise that all men were equally motivated by greed and selfishness. This time would be no different.
***
Joseph, cat of many colors, was sick. He did not eat his sardine. He lay curled on his blanket in the corner and watched Alfie, who watched him back unhappily. Joseph panted when he breathed and made his mouth into silent meows of pain.
Alfie was afraid. He hugged his knees and studied Joseph in the candlelight. It looked as if the lid was closing on his furry friend. The long soft tail flicked nervously. Joseph did not move his tail like that unless he was unhappy. Things were very bad tonight.
Twice more Alfie laid the sardine beside Joseph, but the cat looked away. It was no use dragging the ruby necklace across the floor. Joseph did not want to play. He would not pounce on it or smile his cat smile at Alfie.
“Don’t die,” Alfie moaned. “Please, Joseph. Everyone here is head but you and me. Please get well, Joseph.” Then he reached his hand out to pet Joseph, but the cat growled at him and showed his teeth. He did not want to be touched. He only wanted to lie there and hurt while Alfie watched him sadly.
22
Life Amid the Gravestones
From the bell tower of New Church, Mark and Jamie could clearly see the brown-clad workmen as they drove the posts into the soil of the flower bed outside the iron gate.
“What does it say?” Jamie squinted and tried to make out the lettering of the sign.
“It is the same as the one in front of the synagogue, I think,” said Mark. “So now we know why they wanted to close your father’s church.”
“But Papa told them he liked New Church where it was.” Jamie remembered the day his father had been approached by the government officials with an offer to relocate New Church and build a new building. “Papa told them that New Church was not so big and maybe not new anymore, but that it had stood through two hundred years of storms, and he would not move.” Jamie frowned. “They did not like it.”
“So they got it anyway.” Mark read the sign.
ACHTUNG! ATTENTION! A GLORIOUS NEW CENTER OF GERMAN CULTURE WILL BE CONSTRUCTED ON THIS SITE, BY ORDER OF THE MINISTER OF THE INTERIOR. TRESPASSING FORBIDDEN. HEIL HITLER!
“You suppose that is why they arrested Papa?” Jamie wondered aloud. “And why they burned the synagogue, too?”
“Your papa was arrested because of us,” Mark replied impatiently. “Because we’re Jews. And the Nazis burned the Temple for the same reason. If they want a house or a church or a store or a whole city, they don’t ask anybody. They just take it. That is what my father said the day they arrested him. They wanted our fathers because they are friends. The church doesn’t have anything to do with it.”
When the public works truck drove off, the boys clambered down the spiral steps, relieved that they could report no one left within earshot. But Lori and Jacob were already arguing in the basement over what was left of their food supplies.
Jacob tossed a can of tinned beef down with a clatter. “Once I even thought I liked you. Now I see you are the most stubborn girl who ever lived.”
“And you are nothing but a bully! It is no wonder you got into a fight every time you walked into the street! You can’t even get along with—”
“With you? Ha! Impossible! I wish I had taken Mark and run the opposite direction!”
Mark and Jamie exchanged looks of disgust. This sort of discussion had become a daily occurrence—whispered anger followed by steely silence between Lori and Jacob. Jacob thought he should be the boss. Lori argued with him about everything from sleeping arrangements to how much each person should eat each day in order to preserve their food supply. After all, she reasoned, she had been the one to discover the case of meat tins.
“We cannot go on forever.” Jacob sat down hard on an empty wooden crate. “You think that night watchman isn’t going to come inside some night and catch us by surprise?”
“Not with all your drilling!” Lori exclaimed.
“You want to stay here for the rest of our lives?” Jacob grabbed Mark by the sleeve of his sweater and pulled him close, as if choosing sides for a battle.
“And if we leave, where will we go?” Lori demanded.
“Prague, where your father said we should go all along! There are people there. That pastor he knows. I say we get out of the church!” Jacob was adamant.
Lori gestured at the tin of beef and the boxes of communion wafers. “But we can make it last another month if we’re careful.”
Jamie looked at the boxes of flavorless wafers and grimaced. “Breakfast, lunch, and dinner,” he said mournfully. “And besides, we can’t—”
Lori interrupted him. “My mother and father will certainly be released by then. How would they know where to find us?”
“We can sneak out the basement window,” Jamie interjected.
“Brilliant.” Lori silenced him with a dark look. “Doors and windows chained and padlocked. The Nazi seal across every door. Sneak out the window and go where?”
“Prague, I’m telling you!” Jacob shouted, arguing over the heads of Mark and Jamie.
“We are safer here!” Lori insisted.
“No . . . ,” Mark began, trying to tell Jacob and Lori.
She would not let him speak. “With those signs no one will come snooping. We can wait it out. Even if it takes longer than a month, we can wait! We have water. Coffee and tea in the kitchen. If the Gestapo comes again we will hear them rattle the chains and have time to hide.” Her voice was so full of pathetic hope that Mark and Jamie exchanged looks. Wait until she hears . . .
“Besides,” she continued, “they would take one look at us and arrest us on the spot. We look like we have been mining coal. Or rolling down a mountain. You think we would not be noticed dressed like this?”
Thi
s much of her reasoning was accurate. She was the only one among them who looked halfway clean. She even washed her hair in the dark bathroom once a week.
Mark caught their reflection in the glass of a cupboard. They looked terrible, smelled worse. Their clothes clung to them. Their hair was combed, but badly in need of a trim. They looked precisely like boys who had been hiding out for nearly a month.
Mark eyed Jacob, hoping for help to silence Lori. “They are going to tear down the church,” Mark blurted out.
“That’s right!” Jamie added. “We saw the sign. They are going to build a cultural center. Over the synagogue, too.”
Disbelieving their grim report, Lori simply glared at them and shook her head.
“We aren’t making it up,” Mark protested. “We saw the sign.”
Jacob cuffed his brother angrily. “You were in the bell tower again!”
“But, Jacob!” Jamie backed up as Lori and Jacob suddenly became allies against the two younger boys.
Lori grabbed Jamie by the shirt and yanked him to her.
“You were in the bell tower?” she echoed. “They could have seen you!”
“They’re going to tear down the church!” Mark cried as Jacob shook him again.
Finally Jacob and Lori heard it. “Tear down—” Lori’s anger and disbelief turned to concern. She raised her head as if to listen for the sound of a wrecking ball against the silent stone walls of the little church.
“What did you see?” Jacob demanded!
They told him once again, repeating the words of the sign.
Lori finally spoke over their heads to Jacob. They were almost friends again. “They warned my father that New Church would not stand in the way of the master architect’s plan.” A smile of bitter amusement came to her lips. “I guess you were right, Jacob. We have to leave.”
“Yes.” Jacob’s voice held no pleasure. “I . . . I’m sorry. About this. About your father’s church.”
She chose to ignore his sympathy. She decided yesterday that she loathed Jacob Kalner. She did not know what she had ever seen in him in the first place. She did not want him feeling sorry for her now. Her cool reserve surfaced again. “We will have to wash our clothes and underwear.”
Jacob grasped his trousers at the waist as if to keep her from taking them. The arguing began again. “Nobody is getting my trousers off me,” he scowled. “I saw the SS herding those poor schmucks around the streets in their nightshirts. Not me. If they get me, it will be with my pants on.”
“Go ahead and stink then, Jacob Kalner!” Lori argued. “But stay away from the rest of us! The Gestapo will smell you from Albrechtstrasse and say. ‘Himmel! Somebody must have died in New Church! Better go have a look!’” She lifted her nose haughtily and stepped back a few paces to make her point. “But the three of us will be clean, at least. They will not track us by our scent when we leave! We will be washed!” She wrapped an arm protectively around Jamie, who looked back at her suspiciously. “Won’t we, Jamie?”
“Well,” Mark replied, out of reach of Jacob’s long arm, “at least we won’t stink like Max!”
At that, Jacob’s eyes narrowed in anger and he shook a meaty fist at his brother, who dodged him and joined Lori’s camp.
“We will sleep in the choir robes tonight. And we will be clean enough to walk out of here and go to a movie,” Lori finished triumphantly.
At this, Jacob’s eyebrows went up and he smiled slightly. He would try a different tactic with Lori. If she insisted that they all be clean, there was another way to do it. “Or we can burn these clothes,” Jacob said. He appraised Jamie, who squirmed uncomfortably beneath Lori’s hand. “We will send Jamie back to your house. He can break in and get us whatever we need. I can wear your father’s clothes—”
“No!” Lori said. “I forbid it! Jamie is not going out until—”
“I have some money hidden.” Jamie darted back to Jacob’s side. “I was saving it for Christmas. I can get that and clothes and—” His face flushed with the thought of such an adventure. “And the extra set of keys for Papa’s auto!”
“He will be caught!” Lori wailed. “I am the oldest! I will not allow it!”
Jacob looked at her stonily. “And if he is caught? What then? They will take him back to the Hitler Youth school. And he will be fed and have a place to sleep. But if any of the rest of us are arrested, what then? I am sent to Dachau. You, you pretty little Aryan, will be sent to an SS breeding farm and produce little blond babies for the Fatherland and the Führer.”
Jacob’s last statement was too much for Lori. She burst into tears and ran sobbing up the basement steps. Let them do what they wanted! She was tired of fighting, tired of making decisions for these hateful, terrible boys!
Even the boarded glass of the windows rattled when she slammed the door. Slamming doors was forbidden by Jacob. Lori had the last word, after all.
Once she was gone they made plans without her. At least, Jacob made the plans and the little boys agreed to them.
Jamie would sneak out of the church and raid the parsonage four nights from now when the moon was dark. He would bring back clothes, money, jewelry, and the spare keys to Pastor Ibsen’s automobile.
During a Nazi party rally in Berlin, the foursome would make their break. It would be a simple matter, Jacob explained to his compliant comrades, as long as nobody made any mistakes.
***
The prisoners of Nameless camp recognized the black, mud-splattered Mercedes of Rev. Gustav Dorfman as it passed the main gate. No one was surprised when special roll call was ordered before evening meal.
Caps off, the men were forced to stand in the cold drizzle as Karl Ibsen was once again called out from the ranks.
“You must be an important fellow, Prisoner Ibsen, to have such a visitor.”
By now the other prisoners did not blame Pastor Ibsen at this obvious attempt to drive in the wedge between him and them. They did not blame him that there would be no shelter or soup for all the camp until battle was done between Ibsen and Dorfman.
Karl left them, confident that they would pray for him, hopeful that he would not be kept away long. They were his brothers. Together they huddled on a precipice of survival. They were learning that great battles were won when their prayers silently went up for one another. Although the guards led only Karl into the office of the commandant, several hundred hearts went with him.
Gustav Dorfman came prepared. Dorfman had excelled in theological debate in his seminary days. He had learned early that winning an argument often hinged on simply putting the right emphasis on the correct syllable. From the pulpit, his melodious voice resounding from the rafters, the emphasis he put on certain words and verses had led a congregation and then an entire church into error.
In the days following their first conversation, the men in the barracks had questioned Karl:
“Can this man Dorfman really believe what he preaches, or does he say it just to keep the people in line with the government?”
Karl had thought about those questions deeply before he attempted to answer. In the mud and suffering of Nameless camp he had looked at the prisoner uniforms: striped like prison bars, all the same. “Then God said, “Let us make man in our image . . . .”
So this was the image men like Dorfman saw of the Creator. They made the image a slave to their own ideas—identical, faceless, without color. Dorfman’s god served the masters of the Reich. The basest clay had set out to change the image of the Potter.
“Dorfman’s heart and mind were convinced of his own righteousness before he ever read one word from the Scriptures,” Karl answered. “He has seen what he wants to see in God’s Word. He believes what makes him feel best about himself.”
“But how can he not see the truth?” asked Johann, who had found truth in the tears of Jesus only a few nights before.
“He is like a color-blind man gazing at the shining lights and colors of a prism. His view of God is gray. There is no love or brightne
ss or beauty there, only gray. He has clothed God in a drab gray uniform. He has dressed the heart of the German people in that same uniform and ordered that they march in step. Look at their belt buckles, Johann. Gott mit uns—God with us! Pity them. They have never seen the glory of a rainbow reflected in one teardrop of the Lord! But you have seen it, Johann. So have I. Never mind that they try and make all men look alike and talk alike and think alike and march in step. They have failed before they began, because we are all splashed with the colors of God’s great love for us. Let your heart run and skip with the joy of it, Johann! God sees the colors of your soul, even in this place. From the least among us, He counts us beautiful, made in His image.”
This truth caused Karl to grieve for the grayness of Gustav Dorfman’s soul as the man flipped open his Bible and smugly began his debate in support of conformity to the government policies he proclaimed in his church.
“So, you want God’s word on the subject? Let us begin. Romans, chapter thirteen, is one that every Christian must heed. A command.” He began to read aloud the words that Karl knew by heart. “Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established.” He followed the words with his finger, “Consequently, he who rebels against authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.” He paused and gestured toward the window where the guard towers were clearly in view. “Rulers hold no terror for those who do right . . . .For he is God’s servant to do you good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing. He is God’s servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.”
Karl closed his eyes for a moment, then looked again at the bristling guard towers. He could clearly see the outline of the gray soldier and his machine gun trained on the backs of the men waiting in the field.
“A suitable passage for der Führer to seize upon. This has often been used as a club with which the ignorant have been beaten into submission to evil.”
