by Lila Perl
Lilli’s
Quest
Copyright © 2015 by the Estate of Lila Perl Yerkow.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission of the publisher. Please direct inquires to:
Lizzie Skurnick Books
an imprint of Ig Publishing
Box 2547
New York, NY 10163
www.igpub.com
ISBN: 978-1-939601-54-4
Contents
PART I: 1938–1942
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
PART II: 1942–1946
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
PART III: Summer 1946
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
PART I
1938–1942
One
Lilli wakes up to the sickly yellowish light of a November morning. They are still living in that high-ceilinged, ground-floor flat on Heinrichstrasse. The sun never pierces the tall, narrow windows and to Lilli, who hates the darkness, all of the rooms feel like the insides of brown-paper bags. It is 1938 and Lilli is eleven years old.
She and her younger sister Helga, who is ten, share a bed, very high and with tall, knobby bedposts that are carved with elaborate scrolls. The bed once belonged to Oma and Opa, their grandparents. Lilli’s youngest sister Elspeth, now five, is still sleeping in her old baby cot, which is positioned crosswise at the foot of the family heirloom.
Today begins like an ordinary day. The girls of the Frankfurter family wake up, shiver as they wash themselves at the kitchen sink, and dress in their itchy woolen jumpers, thick black stockings, and sturdy oxfords.
They help Mutti prepare the family breakfast of hot milk, bread, and very small rations of jam, which is running short, as are many so-called luxury goods in Germany in 1938. The country, under its Nazi dictator, Adolf Hitler, is arming not only for war in Europe but to take over the entire world. And Hitler’s armies need to be equipped with the best of everything.
But war shortages aren’t something that Lilli is thinking about right now. She’s more concerned with thoroughly removing the despised skin that has formed on her mug of boiled milk. Mutti gazes at her frowning. “Always the same,” she mutters in a tired voice. “You are throwing away nourishment, my child. It’s hard enough to get milk these days, hard enough to keep body and soul together.”
Lilli can’t help noticing that Mutti, who was once so pretty, with her flaxen hair and flirtatious smile, has become faded, and that there is a faint new crease in her forehead. Papa, who has also come to the breakfast table, is dressed in his usual going-to-the-office suit. But in truth he won’t be going anywhere. Many months ago, Papa was dismissed from his job as a chief scientist at a chemical plant near the town where the Frankfurters live.
When Papa arrived home in the middle of a workday, the astonished girls asked why. “You should already know the answer,” Papa told them, not unkindly. “Why have all of you been forbidden to attend school with German children? Why did the Jewish school then burn down?”
Lilli flashed a bitter smile. “Of course, I know. They hate us, the Jews. What will you do now, Papa?”
There was no answer. Every day Papa dressed for the office. Sometimes he left the apartment and tried to find a job among his Jewish friends. Money had been saved but it was running low, and the Frankfurters had to borrow small sums from Mutti’s family, the Bayers, who were not Jewish.
Papa responds to Mutti’s criticism of Lilli. “Let the child indulge herself, Martina. Who knows what’s coming?”
Papa is so handsome, in Lilli’s opinion—his high cheekbones, the curl of his lips, his dark hair and amber-brown eyes, the richness in his deep voice.
Mutti has caught something in Papa’s words. “You mean … ? Do you think there will be trouble today, Josef?”
Lilli’s eyes and those of her sister Helga flash to the six-pointed yellow star with the word Jude, for Jew, which is sewn onto the sleeve of Papa’s suit. If he goes into the streets searching for work, everyone will know that he belongs to the race that Hitler has sworn to wipe out. Already Jews in Germany have been stripped of their rights as citizens. They’ve been mocked, attacked, beaten, and even arrested. From her parents’ conversation, Lilli senses that something truly evil may be coming.
Yet, the day goes by quietly enough. The older girls do their lessons with Papa instructing. Elspeth practices her alphabet and her reading, urged on by Mutti, and then goes off to play with her dolls. Papa reads the evening newspaper, which has been delivered to him by a kindly neighbor, Mr. Doppler, who is a so-called “pure” German and need not fear being questioned or even arrested by one of Hitler’s special police.
Darkness descends and the girls go off to bed.
It is midnight, or perhaps later, when Lilli awakens to the sound of a distant roar that is punctuated with crashing sounds like those of china or glass being smashed and by the thudding noises of heavy objects being tossed from high places. She lies there for an unknowable time trying to make sense of what is happening. This isn’t the first time that the Nazis have attacked Jewish-owned shops, homes, and schools. But this nighttime assault is much more terrifying than the usual daytime incidents.
Lilli nudges Helga, who sleeps on her stomach, her head sandwiched between two enormous goosedown pillows. “What, what?” Helga moans in annoyance.
“Oh, you are so deaf,” Lilli scolds. “Get up and come with me to the window. Something terrible is happening. They are destroying everything that is Jewish. And the sounds are coming closer.”
Barefoot, the girls tiptoe to the window so as not to wake Elspeth. Cautiously they lift a slat of the partially open wooden blinds for a fuller view. But all is darkness. “It’s nothing,” says Helga. “You and your dreams.”
Lilli is furious enough to want to slap Helga, who is always so stolid and dull, has no imagination, and is never any fun. “Where are you going?” Lilli demands, as Helga prepares to go back to bed. “There is fire. I just saw it. Flames are lighting the sky and that awful noise is coming closer.”
Helga doesn’t answer and Lilli reluctantly follows her sister back to bed. She has no idea how long she’s been lying there, eyes wide open in the dark, when she hears three sharp raps at the door of the apartment.
Even Helga springs up and, in their long flannel nightgowns, the two girls race down the dark hallway to the parlor. To their surprise, the room is lit up, and Mutti and Papa are fully dressed, just as if they’ve been waiting for callers to arrive.
The “callers”—two of Hitler’s secret-police agents—have already entered the Frankfurters’ parlor. They both wear red armbands boldly advertising the well-known black swastika on a white background—the symbol of the Nazi Party. And they are armed with pistols.
Mutti rushes over to her daughters in an attempt to get them out of the room as quickly as possible. But Papa is right behind her. “No, let them stay!” He wrestles the girls free of Mutti and sits them down on the small brocade sofa against the wall. Helga has begun to sob quietly. Lilli holds her sister’s hand tightly. The entire episode passes swiftly and as in a nightmare. The older officer, who introduces himself as Captain Gerhardt Koeppler, tells Papa that he is under arrest and must come with them. When Mutti asks what Papa has done, no reason is given.
“Bring your papers,” Koeppler barks at P
apa “and if you have, a warm coat.”
Mutti gives the pale-skinned Koeppler a pleading glance. “Surely, you need not take him away. He is the father of these children, and one more, the youngest who is only five …”
“I have my orders,” the captain replies a bit less harshly. “You can come and ask for him at Gestapo headquarters. They will inform you.”
Meekly, Mutti goes to get Papa’s coat, and also gloves and a woolen muffler and hat. Papa comes to where Lilli and Helga are sitting and he kneels at their feet. His expression is fierce as he tells them, “Don’t worry, my little loved ones. And above all, don’t forget the reason for this terrible injustice. You must fight such hatred all your lives …”
Captain Koeppler has approached. He taps Papa on the shoulder, as he and the girls clasp one another in a teary embrace. Lilli knows one thing. She will never forget Papa’s arm gripping her shoulder; she will never forget his lips on her wet cheek.
Lilli wakes up to lemony sunshine slanting through the attic window of the tall house in which she and Mutti and her two sisters have been living for nearly six months, following that savage November night on Heinrichstrasse. The event has now come to be called Kristallnacht, or, in English, “Night of Broken Glass.”
The destruction of Jewish property and the brutal arrests of Jewish men continued for a second night. Finally, on the third day, Mutti made her way to the secret-police quarters of the Gestapo. She walked through streets filled with the rubble of shattered windows, broken bricks and concrete, and smashed furniture. Even pianos had been thrown from the balconies of Jewish homes and apartments.
That day, and for many days afterward, Mutti was unable to learn anything of Papa’s fate. The throng of mothers, wives, and daughters seeking information about their loved ones was so great that the building had been cordoned off. Oddly enough, it was a visit by Captain Koeppler to Heinrichstrasse that explained about Papa, and also gave Mutti and the girls “some good advice.” Even on this sunny May morning, as Lilli gazes down onto the street from the turret-like chamber that she and Helga now occupy, she gets a wintry chill thinking of the Nazi officer’s visit a few weeks after Kristallnacht.
Lilli and Helga were at their lessons at the big round table in the parlor under the supervision of Mutti when the doorbell rang. Mutti rose to answer it with both fear and hope. There could be a squadron of booted police come to search the apartment. On the other hand, there could be a helpful messenger with news of Papa.
Lilli looked up from her algebra studies to see a single uniformed figure emerging from the dim vestibule. Without Mutti saying a word, she and Helga leaped up and left the room. “It was he,” Lilli whispered, as they hastened through the hallway to their bedroom, which they no longer shared with Elspeth. As the youngest member of the endangered family, she had already been taken to live with Oma Bayer in the big house in the aristocratic part of town.
“How could you be so sure?” Helga challenged. “You could not even see his face.”
“I know him already,” Lilli answered mysteriously. And soon after Mutti’s caller had left, she came and confided to the girls that it had indeed been Captain Koeppler.
“How could you even talk to him?” Lilli demanded, “after he came here so … so roughly, and took Papa away?” It was then that Mutti gave them the news, trying to sound hopeful about Papa and even grateful to the tall, unsmiling Nazi officer.
At last they knew that after Papa had been taken into custody, he had been sent to a camp for political prisoners, where he would stay until his case had been reviewed. What was Papa’s “case?” He had been accused of belonging to a group of Jews and other disloyal Germans trying to take back their rights as citizens and plotting against the Hitler government.
Helga began to sniff, but Lilli looked proud. “I knew Papa was no coward. He has nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Will Captain Koeppler get him out for us, perhaps?” Helga inquired.
“Perhaps,” Mutti said softly. “Meantime, Papa can write to us.”
“From where?” Lilli demanded. “Where is he? Why can’t your ‘friend’ have him sent home at once?”
“Don’t be silly,” Mutti flared. “The captain is not my ‘friend.’ He is only a classmate from the lower school, many years ago. It was good that he could tell us where Papa was taken. It’s a camp for those who are awaiting trial, or for others having to be punished: Buchenwald.”
The name meant little to the girls or even to Mutti. Later, they would learn that Buchenwald was the second of the many notorious labor and concentration camps to be built in Germany—a place of backbreaking toil, starvation and torture, and, almost always, death.
And what was the “good advice” that Mutti’s former school friend had given her?
Lilli learned that, in the captain’s words, it was to “leave this apartment, which is suspect because of your husband’s activities. You will always be under surveillance here. You can save yourself and even your half-Jewish children by going back to your family home. “Surely,” Captain Koeppler had concluded, “Frau and Herr Bayer, your highly respected parents, would not deny shelter to you and your young ones.”
And so it had happened that Elspeth had gone off first to live with Oma and Opa Bayer, most of the Heinrichstrasse furniture was sold (even the grand, richly-carved bed of Oma and Opa Frankfurter), and Lilli and Helga found themselves attic-dwellers in the Bayer household.
Two
Even before the girls are out of bed, Gerda comes whirling into their “eagle’s nest,” as Lilli has sourly come to call it. The Fuhrer, or Nazi leader, as Adolph Hitler is called, has such a retreat in the form of a chalet on the top of an Alpine peak, where he holds secret conferences.
“Only he’s up there to dominate the world,” Lilli has remarked, “while our attic may as well be a dungeon.”
What Lilli meant was how restricted their lives had become, hers and Helga’s, because of the many anti-Jewish laws that either came into effect or were strengthened following Kristallnacht last November. Jews in Nazi Germany may no longer own radios or typewriters, travel on public transportation, go to the theater or the cinema, to parks or beaches, or to restaurants other than the few cafes still operated by Jews. They must carry ration books stamped with the letter J, limiting the kinds and quantities of food or other goods they may purchase, and can only live only in apartment blocks that bear the Star of David symbol and the letter J above the entrance. So, in effect, the girls are being hidden away in the Bayer household.
But there’s little use reviewing these familiar obstacles this morning, as Gerda bustles around, clapping her hands and ordering “Up, up!” She is of uncertain age, gray-haired and dumpling-cheeked, with a body like that of a sturdy wooden doll. For Lilli and Helga, Gerda has come to be Grossmutter Bayer’s daily emissary.
The girls never address the proud older lady with the informal “Oma” that they used with their wizened, loving Frankfurter grandma before her death. Nor do Lilli and Helga, although living under the roof of the same austere gray-stone house, see much of the elder Bayers, who keep Elspeth close to them in the lower quarters. Grossvater is a more cheerful-looking character than Grossmutter. He appears to be a jolly fellow of the old school and still wears side-whiskers. But he is always hurrying off on “official business,” so the two older girls feel they hardly know him.
“You are to take special care with washing and dressing this morning,” Gerda instructs. “You are going on a shopping outing with your grandmother. Everything must be immaculate. And you are to wear your best clothes.”
Helga and Lilli are speechless. How can this be? It has never happened before. Grossmutter has lavished lots of care on Elspeth and has even shown her blonde little angel off to her women friends. But she has not taken Helga and Lilli anywhere since they have come to live with her, or even appeared to be very concerned with their secluded daily life.
True, she did engage a tutor for the two older girls, because M
utti is now working at a job in a fashion house (as she did before her marriage to Papa). So Mr. Anton Hess, with his sharp-tipped nose and pincenez eyeglasses, comes every weekday to give Helga and Lilli instruction in science, history, and English. “Enough German grammar,” Grossmutter decreed aloud soon after the girls moved in. “Englisch!”
Helga has never questioned this peculiarity. In view of the fact that England is declared to be Nazi Germany’s chief target of destruction, why would Grossmutter Bayer want her granddaughters to learn English? “Perhaps,” Lilli remarks slyly, “she is training us to be spies!”
Helga finds this “crazy,” but Lilli insists it could be true. “Once we know English, the Hitler secret service will smuggle us into England to send them signals about the English war plans. But instead, while there, we could escape the Nazi clutches and become free.”
“Yes,” Helga mocks, “and send for Mutti and Elspeth, and get Papa out of Buchenwald, and live happily ever after. You read too many books, Lilli, all of them fairy tales!”
The mention of Papa returns Lilli to the somber mood that underlies her every conscious minute these days. Yes, there has been some mail from him. The first was a postcard, written from Buchenwald about three weeks after his arrest, which raised everyone’s hopes. My loved ones, I am fine and thinking of you only, as I wait for my case to be reviewed. You cannot write to me, but I will write you again. Do not worry. I send my love to you, Martina, and to my three treasured girls. Josef/Papa
Hope began to fade, however, after a second and a third postcard arrived, bearing the same message in Papa’s handwriting, but with a later date. What could this mean? Only last week a fourth post card of the same kind arrived. “It’s as if Papa wrote these cards all at the same time, but dated them several weeks apart,” Lilli had commented to Mutti. “Why would he do that?”
