And then, one day, her opportunity arose when she was standing in front of her old house, peering in the windows.
“See anything interesting in there, Fräulein?”
Hannah froze. His tone was flirtatious, but it was still the voice of her nightmares. And she was caught. She pivoted slowly away from the window.
“I haven’t seen you around,” he continued. “Let me introduce myself. I am Franz Hoffman. I am the owner of this house.”
Hannah cringed. The monster reached for her hand, and when she touched it she feared she might be sick, right there on the pavement. She gulped in a healing breath, which the Sturmbannführer took for shyness and nerves. That seemed to inflame him even more. He had dropped his Sturmbannführer moniker and now he was simply Herr Hoffman, a presentable German businessman with a clean slate, courting a much younger girl.
He looked at her like a hungry leopard about to pounce on his prey. She had been told by many she was beautiful. She had inherited her blonde hair and green eyes from her mother, who had Scandinavian roots. But her mother’s Aryan looks hadn’t saved her. Hannah had other plans. Hannah had a secret. Her campaign to bring the Sturmbannführer to justice was about to begin.
Herr Hoffman still had hold of her hand. “And you are?”
“Eva,” she said, going by the name given her by the family who had hidden and later adopted her.
“A lovely name,” he commented. Of course he was thinking of Eva Braun, the mistress, and finally wife, of his hero. “For a lovely girl.” And she was barely a girl, just shy of her twentieth birthday, in the bloom of womanhood.
And so began the courtship and the eventual walk down the aisle. Her adoptive parents tried to dissuade her, but she was adamant. This was the man she wanted to marry.
She had been a virgin. There were no prospects for a girl hidden in the attic for years, and when she got out, no Jewish men of appropriate age. Most had been killed during the war. Many German men, too. It was customary to marry an older man. A sign of the times. She had no savings, no means of support other than her work. She hadn’t attended school during the war years. Her low-level job in the accounting firm didn’t pay much, so she hadn’t saved anything.
Of course she had harbored dreams of one day finding true love, of celebrating a wedding night where she and her new husband would enjoy exploring each other’s bodies and creating children. She’d had plenty of time to read about love and romance in the dusty attic of her adoptive parents. But postwar Germany was no place for unrealistic dreams.
Once the plan caught hold, she was determined to see it through. And once she was “in the door,” his home would be hers once again. But what a personal price to pay for justice.
Herr Hoffman was gallant during the courtship. He took her to fine restaurants, to concerts, on picnics, and to meet his friends and family. He was always on his best behavior. A consummate gentleman, holding the door for her, offering her his jacket on cold nights. There were stolen kisses, yes, but he never made an improper move.
Once they had recited their wedding vows, however, his true nature was revealed. He was not a tender or sensitive lover. He was brutal and cruel, and he left bruises and bites when he used her, wherever he touched her. He was also verbally abusive. But she was back in her home among her parents’ things, the beautiful artwork, tapestries, heirloom china and furniture, surrounded once again by the familiar trappings of her family.
Her husband hadn’t changed much about the house. She wandered through the ballroom and imagined she heard strains of a waltz at one of her parents’ many formal dinner parties. They still dined on her mother’s Meissen porcelain, the popular Blue Onion pattern, and the family’s fine heirloom linen tablecloths. The first time she wandered into her parents’ bedroom, now her bedroom, and inspected the drawers, she detected the sweet, powdery vanilla scent of her mother’s favorite perfume, Shalimar, and the fragrance of bergamot brought her to tears. How was that possible after five years? She half expected her mother to come down the hall, but, regrettably, she would never see her mother again.
As the months went by, she noticed that the valuable paintings were slowly disappearing from the walls, sold off by her husband. She didn’t think it was possible she could hate him more. She didn’t think she could tolerate much more of this deception. But her plan was working.
Apparently, despite years of hiding in the dark and deprivation, she was very fertile, because not long after the wedding she showed signs of pregnancy. That was definitely not part of the plan. She was bereft. Herr Hoffman was beside himself with joy. To him she was the classic German maiden repopulating the Fatherland. He even mellowed a bit, but became more proprietary and would hardly let her out of his sight. He took every opportunity to pat her stomach, which made her cringe and made him even lustier, as he fondled her swelling breasts at every opportunity and whispered crude innuendos.
One thing was certain. She would not bring a child of her husband’s into this world. And she would have to act fast, because this baby was growing by leaps and bounds. Her grief was genuine, but she was conflicted. A monster’s spawn was growing inside her, but she wanted so much to have a baby of her own. How could she murder her own child? A child who would carry the essence of her parents. There had been enough killing to last six million lifetimes.
Herr Hoffman demanded sex every night. In fact, he craved it. But when she complained that it wasn’t good for the baby, he began to turn to other women. She was grateful for that. She knew he was unfaithful, because when he came home from late night “meetings” his clothes stank of cheap perfume and there was lipstick on the collar of his shirts. Those women were her saviors. They meant she wouldn’t have to be pawed and suckled by the depraved man she shared her bed with. And he delighted in telling her of his escapades and what the other women let him do to do them.
Whenever he did force himself upon her, mostly in a drunken stupor, he punished her, perhaps because she was no longer the compliant, sweet-natured, sensual girl he had married. He treated her like one of his whores in the bedroom. On those nights, after those times, she went to the shower and spent hours scrubbing the stink of him off her body.
What would he think if he discovered he had married and was sleeping with a Jewess? Turning the tables on him might make her life almost tolerable.
Each Friday night when he left to meet another woman or to meet his friends, she prepared a Shabbos dinner, with flavorful chicken soup and matzo balls, roast chicken, and a fresh-baked challah to welcome in the Sabbath like her mother taught her. She kept the silver polished until it shone. Right before sundown, she covered her head with a lace cap and lit the candles in her parents’ silver candlesticks, which the Sturmbannführer had “acquired” when he appropriated the Hirschfeld home. Then she moved her hands inward in a circular motion three times, covered her eyes, and recited the Sabbath prayer, offering a personal blessing over the souls of her parents and her baby brother.
When she was through eating the meal in silence, she brought the leftover food to a displaced persons camp for refugees and former inmates of Nazi concentration camps. There she ran into Madeline Hammerman, her mother’s best friend, who had miraculously survived Auschwitz. And that was how she got by, living for those Friday nights, awash in sweet memories, helping others. The residents of the camps were ghost people, shadows, hovering between life and death, with only hope to keep them tethered to the earth.
Herr Hoffman often spoke of his continuing search for a cache of diamonds. She knew he was talking about her father’s diamonds. Apparently they were still hidden somewhere in the house. Hannah had desperately tried but couldn’t find them either. Her father had hidden them well, or maybe they really had never been in the house. A lot of good they had done her family or the other families planning to leave the country with them. Her father had betrayed his friends, whose families met the same fate as hers. He wouldn’t give up the hiding place of the diamonds, so they had paid with their lives.
But even if she couldn’t find the diamonds, she had something better—a hand-copied stack of incriminating documents. Franz was involved in a secret society of ex-SS officers who met on a regular basis at the Hirschfeld house, which was how she thought of it. They called themselves the Zersetzung Gruppen KG. Loosely translated, it meant disintegration and dispersal. Dissolution and salvaging of assets and possessions, property, objects of art, bank accounts, gold, silver, and currency. Primarily Jewish assets were being transferred. Not legally transferred, but appropriated through apprehension or seizure, like Herr Hoffman had seized her house and many of the valuable goods inside.
There might once have been hastily drawn contracts, agreed to by desperate people who signed on the dotted line under duress, to gain any amount of money in hopes of escaping their fate. Zersetzung Gruppen KG was in the business of appropriations, liquidations, and transfers as if it were a legitimate moving and storage company going about transferring possessions of happy people on the move. And her husband was the ringleader of the group. The head of the snake. The president of the Gruppen.
Their intent wasn’t to reestablish the Reich or take back Germany. But it was more than just old warriors reminiscing about the good old days. Their motives were more materialistic. Collectively, they had accumulated untold wealth in the form of jewels and money and property and priceless paintings from the families they had terrorized or deported. Few of their victims had survived, so these vultures were in a position to profit from their tragedy. These lesser functionaries of the party had flown below the radar screen of the Allies and escaped the notorious Nuremberg trials. Members of the group infiltrated the government in strategic positions in order to maintain even more control over their ill-gotten gains and enable their comrades to continue to line their pockets with the spoils of war.
They had strategic connections. If a painting of questionable provenance surfaced, the group had an art dealer who was willing to look the other way for a hefty fee. If they came into possession of a fabulous emerald necklace, there was a jeweler on their payroll to facilitate the sale. Specifically, a jeweler who had taken over her father’s boarded-up shop and all of the merchandise in it, as easily as her husband had taken possession of her father’s house, without benefit of any transaction papers. They controlled banks, corporations, even the secret police. Whether the German government was unaware of their actions or merely complicit, what did it matter? Zersetzung Gruppen KG was all-powerful and unstoppable.
Her experience at the accounting firm came in handy. Franz decided to have her sit in on their meetings and take detailed minutes. Over the past weeks and months, she had gathered enough evidence to prosecute this traitorous ring of “pseudo patriots.” She took copious notes about where they hid their money, banks they did business with, anything of importance they discussed when they met at her house. She listed every name. Documented every plan. Copied every account number. Recorded the sale of every stolen painting. Some of which she recognized from the homes of her parents’ friends. One in particular was a Degas painting of ballet dancers. Madeline Hammerman was a French ballet dancer, and the Hammermans had prized that painting.
All the while she served as the group’s secretary, she was also cooking their meals and tolerating their foul-smelling pipe smoke and their bawdy jokes. Her husband allowed his friends to paw her at will. The beasts grew lustier with every stein of beer they consumed. They had little respect for a pregnant woman—or any woman, for that matter.
But what she had discovered would be worth the cost. In the end, though, who could she report her findings to? Who could she trust? Certainly not the German government, which had abdicated its responsibility and plunged her country into a devastating economic death spiral and now seemed to be protecting the very people who were responsible for the reign of terror against its citizens. She couldn’t approach a newspaper. Who knew its real sentiments? Behind every benign German mask, every façade, she saw the face of evil. To the outside world, the members of the Gruppen appeared contrite, but alone, in their conclave, she detected no evidence of regret. Deep down, these men hadn’t changed at all.
Maybe she could take the damaging documents to the Israelis? She didn’t know any of those. Israel was a fledgling faraway land she could never hope to get to. Groups of Jews were reportedly being smuggled into Palestine, but she had no money of her own to make the journey. Herr Hoffman kept a close watch on her and permitted her only enough money to maintain the household. She was, after all, his property. He wouldn’t let her out of the house to work. He had forced her to quit her job because she might come into contact with people who would fill her head with ideas. So, in a way, she was trapped, in hiding again, just like she had been during the miserable, dark war years, a virtual prisoner in her own home.
When she had accumulated enough evidence against her husband and his friends, she contemplated her exit plan. She dreamed of escaping. But how? She could kill Herr Hoffman in his sleep, or poison his food. As his widow, she might inherit his house, her family’s house. But was she capable of murder? She doubted it, although she had imagined it dozens of times in her head. She had visions of poisoning the traitorous lot of them, perhaps in the food or the wine she served them. She would be generous with the tainted portions. Meanwhile her belly was growing larger as her options grew smaller.
Could she wait for her husband to grow old and die? She didn’t want to spend one more minute, much less one more night, with this disgusting man she had married. Perhaps she could arrange for him to suffer a serious, unexpected accident.
In the end, she couldn’t stand to be in his presence a moment longer. And she wanted to get rid of his child, but abortions were illegal throughout Germany. She could have gone to the Netherlands, but she decided to go to Switzerland. Much as she hated her husband, she had come to the conclusion she couldn’t end the life she was carrying.
She took a stack of money from one of her husband’s hiding places, packed an overnight bag with the documents she had collected and her mother’s silver candlesticks, and boarded the train to Switzerland, where the story of her life began. Exhausted, she went to a hotel near the train station, but there were no vacancies. Too tired to go on, she rested on a bench in a park by the lake and fell asleep. She awoke in the morning, cold, her face tear-stained, wondering what to do next.
A man walking his dog came by and asked what was wrong. She had nowhere else to turn. She was a virtual stranger in this country. He was well dressed, sympathetic, and had understanding eyes. So he sat down on the bench beside her, and she told him everything about her predicament. It turned out this man was a prosperous Swiss banker. He dried her eyes with his handkerchief and told her that every life was precious in God’s eyes and agreed she should keep the child.
‘“And how will I raise him or her?”
“We will find a way.” Right then and there, she fell in love with Hans-Peter Grandcoeur. He was a good provider and a tender lover and partner. She moved in with him, told him she couldn’t marry him because legally she was still married. They were blessed with four children of their own in addition to the Sturmbannführer’s son, and they had a very happy life up until the day her beloved “husband” died. She didn’t regret a moment of her life with him.
PART THREE
THE ADVENTURES OF
PARKER, POLLY,
ALEXANDER AND HALLELUJAH
Chapter Six
Sailing Toward the Baltic Sea
Hallelujah and Alexander
Present Day
AS THE PLANET SPINS SCRIPT EXTRACT
BY HALLELUJAH WEISS
SCENE 3. ABOARD A LUXURY YACHT CHARTER IN THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA.
PARKER: It’s all arranged, then.
POLLY: What’s arranged?
PARKER: I’ve spoken to the captain. We’re to be married aboard ship. It will be our most incredible wedding yet. We’ll be stopping at the most exotic ports—the French Riviera, the Italian Coast,
and Greece.
POLLY: [SIGHING] Those places sound lovely, but as usual, you’re getting ahead of yourself. I haven’t accepted your proposal.
PARKER: But you’re wearing my ring.
POLLY: [ADMIRES THE FLASH OF THE EMERALD-CUT DIAMOND IN AN ANTIQUE PLATINUM SETTING ON HER FINGER] I do love the ring, Parker, but I haven’t decided to take you back.
PARKER: Polly, what can I do to convince you? How can I make it up to you? I’ve already told you I was sorry I slipped.
POLLY: Slipped? You make it sound like you accidentally stumbled over a piece of furniture instead of breaking my heart. You cheated on me, Parker, again. I don’t know how much more of it I can take.
PARKER: And yet you still love me, because you know we were meant to be together.
POLLY: You don’t make it easy to love you, Parker. When I think of all those other women. I used to believe in destiny, but not anymore.
PARKER: You’re the only woman for me, Pollyanna.
****
Hallelujah put the finishing touches on her latest script and catapulted it into cyberspace. Officially, she was still on vacation, but this creative burst of energy could not be denied. The new pages represented some of her best work yet, and she could hardly wait to share it with her boss. The cruise would provide plenty of fodder for future episodes.
The response from California was swift. The executive producer, the head writer, and the show’s creator loved the idea of Parker and Polly patching things up on a romantic ocean cruise and a wedding on the high seas. The timing was perfect for the February Sweeps. They would take As the Planet Spins on the road. The whole cast would be written into the plot, from the cream of Milano society to the chief of police. But Hallelujah wasn’t sure Polly was ready to take her errant husband back. She wanted to make him pay. There would be no smooth sailing for Parker. Secrets from Parker’s past would be revealed. That would keep the viewers on the hook.
Stumble Stones Page 5
