Saving Amelie

by Cathy Gohlke

  Amelie remembered the strong hands that had wrenched her from her mother’s neck, her mother’s arms. She knew that the man in the white coat had shut her in a room with other children. She was intrigued by the children—most bigger than she. But she wanted her mother. None of the other children had mothers. Where were all the mothers?

  When the pungent smell and vapory cloud began to fill the air, grown-ups had thrown open the door, picking up children and pulling them from the room into the burning hallway. Amelie had been frightened by the chaos and the eyes of grown-ups filled with terror. She’d cowered back, behind a crib, into the corner.

  The man in the white coat returned. Through the rungs of the crib she could see his mouth making shapes, could see his features distort, see him cough in the growing smoke and heat. But he looked so mean, so angry—like her father when he was frustrated with her. She didn’t want the man to see her, to touch her again. Amelie shut her eyes tight and made herself as small as she possibly could, curling into a ball beneath the crib.

  She didn’t see when the strong hands jerked her out, banging her head sharply on the bottom of the crib. She yelped in pain. And then the hands dropped her to the floor. Their owner stumbled backward. Different hands grabbed her up, tucked her beneath a blanket so tight she could barely breathe.

  The hands carried her, bumping her up and down as they ran. Her head throbbed. She tasted the sticky blood oozing from the gash on her forehead. And then everything went dark.

  Rachel received a note, scribbled across a napkin, with the Sunday morning coffee delivered to her room. Three words had never meant so much.

  Safe and well.

  She accompanied her father to the Sunday-morning memorial service held in the largest Lutheran church in Berlin. Two dozen people gathered to mourn and pay their respects in the dark church—mostly curiosity seekers from the neighborhood of the fire.

  Gerhardt portrayed the stoic German officer, proudly humbled in his grief. Kristine hunched, tearful and pale beneath her black veil.

  Nothing the Lutheran pastor said could comfort the young mother, and though Rachel sensed Gerhardt’s kindness toward his wife at the front of the church was show, she was glad he had the decency to make a display for the public. She hoped that was in some way a help to Kristine.

  But as the few mourners began to leave, while Kristine knelt at the altar and the pastor spoke with her, Gerhardt stepped back, joining Rachel and her father, as though they were his family, more his concern than Kristine.

  “My condolences for your loss, Gerhardt,” her father said, extending his hand.

  Gerhardt nodded. “An unfortunate end.”

  Rachel seethed inside. “Unfortunate, Herr Schlick?”

  “You can see what her death has done to Kristine. I’ve seen daily what the child’s life did to her.” He straightened. “Kristine will grieve. We shall see if she is able to overcome her grief.”

  “She needs to get away.” It was a sudden inspiration on Rachel’s part. “Father—” she laid her hand on his arm—“I want to take Kristine home with us. Let her get away for a time.” She turned to Gerhardt. “It will do her a world of good.”

  Gerhardt’s eyes registered surprise, then a hint of frost. “Out of the question.”

  “Why?” Rachel demanded. “Look at her, Gerhardt—she’s desperate. She needs help.”

  “Precisely why I cannot allow her to leave my side. The best doctors are here, in Germany. I will see that she gets the help and care she needs.” He leaned closer. “You forget, Fräulein Kramer, that Kristine is my wife, that we have lost this unfortunate child together, and that we must certainly grieve together. It is only seemly.”

  “You don’t strike me as the horribly grieving father.”

  “Rachel!” her father admonished. “Lower your voice.”

  She did, but she couldn’t stop herself. “Her absence will give you freedom to throw yourself into your all-important work. And I daresay you know how to find comfort elsewhere.”

  Half a smile pasted Gerhardt’s lips. He leaned closer, whispered in her ear. “If that is an invitation . . .”

  Rachel felt the rush of fury up her neck and face extend down her arms and to the tips of her fingers. She would have slapped him had Kristine not begun walking toward them.

  Rachel stepped to meet her friend, enfolding the broken woman in her arms. “I want you to know that I love you, Kristine, and I want you to come home—to New York—with Father and me. The rest will do you good.” She turned her head and, clasping Kristine’s arms, whispered into her friend’s ear, “She’s safe and well.”

  Kristine gripped her hands in return, squeezing them for dear life.

  “Rachel,” her father counseled, “you must not interfere. A wife’s place is by her husband’s side.”

  “I could not have said it better myself, Doctor.” Gerhardt pulled Kristine from Rachel’s arms. “Come, Kristine, hold your head up. You are an officer’s wife. There will soon be family deaths for some of those attending today, a natural by-product of war. You must set an example.”

  12

  IN LESS THAN A WEEK Kristine’s body was dragged from the River Spree.

  Rachel and her father stood again behind Gerhardt in the dark and flowerless Lutheran church, one week after Amelie’s service, and listened as the same pastor, this time looking ten years older, read the funeral liturgy through.

  Fewer mourners attended this time—the neighbors living on either side of the Schlicks, two SS officers and their smartly dressed wives, an elderly black-veiled woman who said she’d sold Kristine flowers on occasion, and Drs. Verschuer and Mengele, up from Frankfurt on business, wearing pristine summer suits. Kristine had made few friends during her time in Germany. Gerhardt had seen to that.

  Rachel glanced at the back of Gerhardt’s neck, her heart railing against her chest. She knew he’d murdered his wife, as surely as she knew Kristine had seen it coming. But Rachel had not expected it so soon. She’d been certain there would be time to help Kristine escape, to organize a plan with Jason Young’s help to eventually reunite mother and child.

  Only now did Rachel realize how naive she’d been, how right Kristine was, how much she wished she could go back and change . . . everything. But what could she have done differently? Whom could she have turned to for greater help? Rachel twisted her handkerchief in gloved fingers and dabbed at the bitter tears beneath her veil.

  “She fell mad in her grief,” Gerhardt, the stalwart grieving widower, commented to the pastor as the coffin was carried out. “She had no strength, no stamina.”

  “Sturmbannführer Schlick.” Dr. Verschuer extended his hand. “Unfortunate.” Rachel saw him search Gerhardt’s eyes.

  But Gerhardt did not flinch. He simply agreed, “A weakened strain.” He lifted his shoulders. “The river called her name, and she, apparently, could not resist.”

  Rachel wanted to slap them, to shout at them for their melodrama—melodrama they did not even mean. But her father pulled her toward the door. “I am meeting with Dr. Verschuer and Dr. Mengele this afternoon and evening, while they are in Berlin. I may be late. Shall I call you a taxi?”

  Rachel shook her head. What is the matter? Doesn’t he see? “Father, you know this was no suicide. You know Gerhardt—”

  Her father elbowed her sharply, glancing over his shoulder. She saw Dr. Mengele watching them. Her father acknowledged the doctor with a nervous nod. Rachel allowed herself to be pulled from the church, walking quickly, in a viselike grip arm in arm with her father, down the outside steps. He whispered urgently, “Say nothing, Rachel.”

  “But—”

  “Nothing! Whatever happened is none of our affair. There is nothing to be done.”

  “It’s murder, Father!”

  “Stop it.” Still walking, he shook her. “I warn you! You’re hysterical. Go back to the hotel and stay there. I’ll return as soon as I’m able.”

  But she’d taken all she could stand and wrench
ed away. “Father, I want to go home! I want to go back to New York now!”

  “That is not possible.”

  “What do you mean? You said we’d go home after . . . Our plane leaves tomorrow!”

  “Fräulein Kramer!” Gerhardt’s call came from behind them as he hurried down the church steps, flanked by Verschuer and Mengele.

  Her father shot her a warning glance.

  “Will you be joining us for luncheon?” Gerhardt asked—too bright and eager for a man who’d just closed his wife’s coffin.

  Unnerved by her father’s behavior, she played the game. “No, no—I’m going back to the hotel. I have a sick headache, and I’m not hungry.”

  “Regrettable, Fräulein. I was hoping for your company.”

  She felt she might vomit at his audacity. What’s the matter with him—with Father and all of them that they don’t see Gerhardt’s behavior for what it is?

  He took her hand. “You were a great favorite of Kristine’s, you know.”

  She tried to pull away, but he maintained his grip. “She was my friend.”

  “Yes. I understand. There is just one thing. I am certain Kristine would have wanted you to have something—something special to remember her by.”

  Rachel nearly choked. Tears of grief and frustration, of heartbreak, threatened to spill.

  “I would like for you to come to my home, to go through her things with me. Take anything you wish.”

  She couldn’t speak—her mixture of disgust, regret, and the terrible longing for Kristine’s life threatened to drown her.

  “As you will understand, it is a task I find most difficult. It would be a gift to me—and to Kristine—for you to do this.” He squeezed her hand again. “Say you will come.”

  Rachel fought her instincts. But her longing to be near some semblance of Kristine, her futile wish to let her friend know how desperately sorry she was that she had not believed and acted upon those beliefs from the start—and her fear of Gerhardt’s unnatural grip of her fingers—held sway. She nodded miserably. “I’ll come. But it must be tomorrow, before our evening plane.” She said it in challenge to her father, but he looked away.

  “Excellent!” Gerhardt barely restrained his jubilance. “I shall call for you tomorrow at noon.”

  The tears welled in earnest, and she could not stop them. But she would not cry in front of Gerhardt Schlick or the doctors. Rachel turned away, ready to bolt. In five long strides her high heel caught on a seam in the walkway, the black leather pump slipping from her foot.

  It was in retrieving her shoe that she heard Dr. Mengele’s words, carried softly on the breeze.

  “Things are falling into place.” And then, decidedly, firmly, “No more loose ends.”

  “She will comply,” her father answered. “I’m ready to seal the file.”

  Rachel glanced up in the shade of her veiled hat brim. Each man’s eyes swallowed her whole.

  Jason had been waiting, watching the front of the church from behind a newspaper a block away. He registered the interchange between Gerhardt and Rachel on the church steps as he scribbled beneath the front-page headline. When the group of four men entered a black Mercedes and drove past, he folded the paper and walked in the opposite direction.

  He waited until Rachel reached an intersection, stepped beside her, and casually let the paper fall between them. He retrieved the paper and, handing it to her, spoke clearly enough for bystanders to hear. “Excuse me, Fräulein, you’ve dropped your paper.”

  Before she could acknowledge him or speak, he lifted his hat and swung up onto the trolley just rolling away. He’d ride for half an hour and backtrack to the café address he’d written beneath the headline. He’d wait an extra hour to give her enough time to return to the hotel and make a second trip out the back door in case she was being followed.

  Jason knew he was acting as though he were in the midst of a spy novel. He wished he didn’t feel the need.

  At half past one, Rachel followed the waiter to an outside table of the Zillheln Street Café. Urns filled with trailing, blooming flowers—in shades of red and white—bordered the cast-iron tables. Rachel ordered ersatz coffee and a plate of warm apple strudel ladled with custard sauce—comfort food her mother had made for her when she was a little girl in need. If only her mother were here now. She would know how to reach her husband, shake him back into his moral fiber, bring to life the good man that he once was—at least that she’d believed him to be.

  The crusted shell of a man that had shaken Rachel on the church steps, that had leveled the bomb that they may not be returning to America tomorrow, that allowed children to be euthanized and her childhood friend to be murdered—this was not someone Rachel recognized or knew how to confront. He was not the father who’d raised her.

  “Penny for your thoughts.” Jason was suddenly opposite her.

  “They’re not that valuable. They’re certainly not pretty.” She bit her lip and looked away, determined not to cry in front of him.

  He reached for her hand. “Your little package is safe—as are the others who disappeared.”

  Rachel closed her eyes, a tear of gratitude slipping down her cheek. “Thank God, and thank you for getting me word.”

  “God, and some very good, very brave Germans.”

  “And you.” She swallowed, meaning it.

  He squeezed her fingers and sat back. “She won’t be able to stay there much longer . . . too risky.”

  Her heart tripped. “Then—”

  “Then we’ll have to keep moving her.”

  “Does she look like Kristine?” Rachel almost didn’t want to know.

  Jason smirked, taking her fork and biting into her strudel. “Not now.”

  Rachel waited.

  He leaned forward, whispering, “They cut her hair short and dyed it—still blonde, but darker. Dressed her like a boy. Not sure that will take. She’s the prettiest boy I’ve ever seen.” He sat back, sipping his own coffee. “It’s the deafness that’s hardest to conceal. From a distance she’s fine—like any other kid. But up close, if someone speaks to her, she doesn’t answer, doesn’t respond to sudden noise. And she communicates through sign language—or tries to. But nobody can understand her, and they just try to keep her still so she doesn’t draw attention. It’s risky, for everyone. So—” he shrugged—“there’s the rub.”

  Rachel pressed her palms into her eyes, her temples. She couldn’t help Amelie. She couldn’t even help herself. No longer hungry, she pushed the strudel toward Jason, who gladly dug in. It wasn’t long before he set the empty plate aside.

  “I’m sorry about your friend. I never thought she’d—”

  “She didn’t!” Rachel snapped. “Gerhardt murdered her.”

  “That’s a tall accusation. You have proof?”

  Rachel stared at him, trying to decide what to tell him. But there was no one else to confide in. Her father was no help, whether from fear or because he’d sold the last remnant of his soul to Gerhardt and the doctors of the eugenics movement—perhaps to the Reich’s Führer himself; she didn’t know. She only knew that she had no one, and that Jason had saved Amelie.

  “Kristine told me that Gerhardt wanted to get rid of her, that he wants to produce perfect Aryan children for the Reich—that it is required of those rising in the ranks of the SS.”

  Jason nodded. “That’s true. Hitler’s even created homes filled with ‘genetically pure’ unmarried women to help increase the birthrate—all at the disposal of those great German specimens of manhood, Hitler’s supermen.”

  “The SS.” Rachel felt the bile rise in her throat. “Kristine said that Gerhardt wanted to be free to marry someone who was genetically—eugenically—strong and pure. Someone who would not produce a deaf child.”

  “Did deafness run in her family?”

  “No!”

  “Then how does he know he’s not the problem? I didn’t know deafness was even hereditary.”

  “It’s not—at least the
y have no definitive proof that it is. But the eugenics movement believes that handicaps and deformities are caused by weakened strains in the bloodline, and that those bloodlines should be eliminated.”

  “That’s what I was trying to get your father to say—to publicly admit!”

  “So you can sell more papers? So you can secure your byline?” She couldn’t stop the sarcastic rise in her voice.

  He leaned across the table. “So it wouldn’t come to this.”

  She stared him down until he sat back.

  “But if I get the byline, I’m not opposed,” he admitted.

  “In the US they advocate sterilization—so certain bloodlines won’t continue.”

  “Germany sterilizes too, if they can wait out the generation. If not, they just do away with them. Quick cure.” His sarcasm matched her own.

  “That’s what Kristine said Hitler is mandating for those who are considered a drain on German society—‘life unworthy of life.’ But I don’t think even those laws would have allowed Kristine’s murder.”

  “Which is why he did it so soon after the explosion—to make it look like the grief-stricken mother took her own life.”

  “But she didn’t—I know it! I told her Amelie was safe once you got me word—the very day of Amelie’s funeral. She would have lived for that, and for the hope of one day seeing her.” Rachel closed her eyes, shutting out images of a struggle on a bridge, a pier, the shore—wherever it was. The terror of Kristine’s last moments. She felt Jason push a handkerchief into her hand. Without opening her eyes she took it, grateful for his silence.

  At length, he said, “I guess when this is all over, assuming we can keep Amelie safe, you’ll still want to take her back to America?”

  Rachel opened her eyes. She would have laughed if it hadn’t all seemed so impossible, so preposterous, so absolutely frightening. “That was my hope—when this stupid war is finished. But there’s more. It looks like I may not be returning to New York after all.”