Saving Amelie

by Cathy Gohlke

  Rivka sat back, breathed deeply, then lit the two candles, drawing their flames toward her. Rachel thought she might be praying or remembering seders past, but she looked up and reverently began, “Barukh atah Adonai Eloheynu Melekh ha’olam asher kidshanu bidevaro uvishmo anakhnu madlikim haneyrot shel yom tov. . . . Blessed are You, O Lord our God, Ruler of the universe, who has set us apart by His Word, and in whose Name we light the festival lights.”

  Each of the foods caught in Rachel’s throat as she listened, transfixed, to Rivka. I’ve lived my whole life and not known such things existed. She looked at the faces of her family in the circle: Oma, Lea, Friederich, and little Amelie, whose trusting eyes danced in the candlelight. They weren’t Jewish, but the little service held something sacred for them—she saw it in their faces, in their unshed tears. What did Friederich mean about Jesus being our Passover Lamb? And Rivka—she’s Jewish. How can she share this ceremony with Christians after Gentiles arrested and may have murdered her family? What is this connection she holds with my family that I don’t have?

  When the seder ended and the candles burned low, Rachel heard Rivka whisper beneath her breath, “Next year . . .”

  “Next year?” Rachel asked, reaching for Rivka’s hand.

  Rivka, tears streaming, gripped Rachel’s in return. “Next year in Jerusalem!”

  That night, as the others prepared for bed, Rachel tucked Amelie beneath her covers. The little girl fell fast asleep with her thumb tucked into her mouth. Only then did Rachel turn to Rivka. “I don’t understand about this Passover. How is it connected to Jesus?”

  “There is no connection to the Christian Jesus—it’s about our flight from Egypt and Adonai’s protection over us. The night the firstborn—”

  “I get that; I do. But what did Friederich mean about Jesus being our Passover Lamb? About His blood covering us?”

  Rivka sighed. “My brother believed that too.”

  “Your brother? You mean—”

  “My brother believed that Jesus was Messiah, and not only that, but that He was the Son of God, that He was the atonement for our sins—for the sins of all the world.”

  “A Hebrew Christian?”

  Rivka nodded. “A fat lot of good that did him with the Nazis. ‘Once a Jew, always a Jew,’ they said.” She snorted. “The ‘chosen people.’ Chosen for persecution! I say, choose somebody else!”

  “But your parents—”

  “Orthodox.”

  “Did they know your brother—?”

  “The night he told us of his conversion . . . it was Shabbat, two months after my bat mitzvah. We lit the candles—the silver candlesticks my mother said would one day be mine. The ones those pigs stole.” Rivka stopped. Rachel looked away as Rivka swiped her tears. Minutes passed. “My brother said the prayers. We were eating.” Rivka looked in some far-off place, remembering. “My brother told us he was helping our people get out of Germany, that he could get us all passports. He’d learned to forge them—he showed me how it was done. He urged my parents to go, but they would not hear of it. They thought it could not be so bad, that the persecutions would stop.

  “When he saw he wasn’t getting anywhere, he told us something more astounding. At first, we didn’t understand. He talked about his Gentile friends and their Kirche—how he’d gone with them once, on a dare. My father looked like thunder, and my mother kept trying to change the subject.

  “But Jacob said he’d learned things he never knew before, and that he’d come to see that this Jesus, this Yeshua, was truly Messiah. He tried to convince my parents to go to the Kirche with him, to listen to the pastor’s words. Before he could say more, my father howled and tore his shirt. He ordered Jacob from the house, from the family, then turned his back until the door latched behind him. My mother wailed, like the mourners. The rabbi came the next day, after Shabbat, and we sat shivah for Jacob. After that, my parents would not allow his name to be spoken.”

  “Never?”

  Rivka blushed in the candlelight and shook her head. A moment passed before she whispered hoarsely, “I disobeyed them. It was the only thing I remember doing that rebelled so against their wishes.”

  Rachel waited.

  “The last night I went to bed early, pretended to sleep. When all was quiet, when I heard mein Vater snoring, I slipped through my bedroom window and climbed down the tree outside. I ran to my friend Anna’s. Jacob was waiting there for me.” Tears trickled down Rivka’s face.

  “So your brother’s safe? Do you know where he is now?” Rachel couldn’t believe Rivka had never spoken of him.

  But Rivka shook her head, sniffing. “Nein, nein. Anna lived just down the street from my family. She is Gentile, but a good friend. It was not the first time she’d arranged for Jacob and me to meet. We were talking—so precious the minutes, they flew—when we heard the truck squeal to a stop at the top of the street. No one should be out that time of night—the curfew. We heard the dogs, snarling, barking. We knew right away. They ran from house to house, pounding on doors, barking orders, searching for Jews, dragging them from their beds.”

  Rachel swallowed.

  “Anna would have hidden us both, tried to hide us beneath their stairwell. But Jacob pushed me into the hiding place, insisted I stay there until morning. He raced to our home to warn our parents.” Rivka began to cry uncontrollably.

  “They took him, too?”

  Rivka nodded and repeated, “It never mattered that he’d converted to Christianity.”

  “No, it wouldn’t,” Rachel whispered, hearing in her mind the hate-filled rants of Hitler, remembering the dogma of her father denigrating every race, every skin color other than those whose papers could “legitimately” be stamped Aryan.

  “But I think,” Rivka ventured, “that it mattered to Jacob. Saving himself was not why he converted. He believed—with everything in him. I think, in the end, he was glad to be taken with our parents. He’d said that night that he expected to be taken soon, that he wanted to talk with our parents one last time, to share with them what he’d learned about Messiah Yeshua. To urge them to believe.”

  “He was very brave to warn them. He could have stayed hidden.”

  “For a long time I was angry with him for going, for leaving me, when he was sure to be caught. But now I, too, think he was brave.” She hesitated again. “And I think, though I don’t understand it, that it was his love for this Yeshua, and for our parents, that made him go. I only hope . . . I hope my father forgave him . . . loved him again.”

  “Don’t give up on them. Maybe, when this is all over . . .” But Rachel couldn’t finish, didn’t believe her own encouragement.

  Rivka didn’t answer, but lay down, turning over. Amelie stirred in her sleep. The candle had burned low.

  Rachel lay down too, stroking Amelie’s hair, soothing her brow and staring up at the darkening ceiling, the last of the candle flame’s shadows fading. What it all meant, exactly how everything fit together, she wasn’t sure—only that there was a connection. What Rivka had said about her brother sounded like the same love, the same relationship with this Jesus, that compelled Oma, Friederich, Lea, surely Curate Bauer, and perhaps Jason to help so many—to help her. It was something shut up inside them that filled them until it forced its way out, compelling them to share what they’d experienced, insisting that they help others, even when it meant that they must risk their lives to do it. It was that thing Bonhoeffer wrote about—“costly grace.”

  Rachel sighed and closed her eyes. It was beyond her. She didn’t understand why she couldn’t feel what they felt, see what they saw. She certainly didn’t want to buy into any hocus-pocus. That would be as futile as her father’s pseudoscience. But the more she thought about it, the more she read and lived with them and witnessed their lives, their faith, the more she knew there was something real and empowering in it. Whatever it was, it would not let her go.

  51

  APRIL GAVE WAY to May. Jason worried over the photograph of Rache
l and Amelie. Every day he wondered if Schlick or one of his cohorts would come across the magazine cover, wondered if he’d return to Oberammergau.

  He didn’t have long to stew. Jason was recalled to Berlin, where rumors spun out of control. Tension in Wilhelmstrasse was palpable, every correspondent on edge and packed to be sent out at a moment’s notice. Where would Hitler attack next—Holland, Belgium, the Maginot Line, Switzerland?

  After a long and frustrating day pounding pavement, trying to get quotes from the Gestapo for a story nobody wanted to acknowledge, Jason plunked his reporter’s pad and pencil onto his desk and slumped in his chair, only to be ordered to cover a black-tie embassy dinner in an hour’s time. He groaned.

  Peterson, the staff photographer, shrugged in sympathy. “Sorry, pal. Chief’s orders.”

  “Why me? Covering the dandies is Eldridge’s beat now.”

  “You didn’t hear? Eldridge has vamoosed—gone stateside.”

  “When?” Jason couldn’t believe it. Eldridge would never leave when the news was this hot.

  “Last week. He got an offer from the Chicago Trib.”

  Jason whistled. “Lucky break. That’s near his hometown.”

  Peterson nodded. “Took him all of two minutes to accept.”

  “So why’d they come after him?” Jason knew Eldridge was a decent reporter, but he’d not have thought he was sought-after material.

  “Some great picture he took, near as I can tell.”

  “Something you developed, no doubt.” Jason underlined the irony.

  “Nope. He took that one all the way, though I have to say it looked more your style than his—a Bavarian Madonna and child, they called it, along with a sappy feature. Sure got somebody’s attention.”

  Jason straightened. It was the first time he’d heard that spin for the photograph, but he could see how it fit. The sleaze. He prayed it was all American attention and that it kept Eldridge over the pond, far from any connection to Oberammergau, Rachel, or him for the duration. He had no desire to share a cell or find themselves dangling on identical ropes when the thief squealed. And squeal he surely would, if interrogated. It was better this way. If caught, Rachel, Amelie, even Curate Bauer and the entire network would line up like dominoes, waiting to fall.

  Jason covered the black-tie dinner without complaint.

  Two days later he was sent on assignment to Britain, where Neville Chamberlain resigned as British prime minister and Winston Churchill took up the post. Hitler launched an invasion of the Low Countries.

  Unkempt, with three days’ stubble and no shower, Jason shouted his makeshift article through poor telephone lines to New York. “Germany marched at dawn into Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg, where Hitler proclaims he is ‘safeguarding the neutrality of the Belgians and the Dutch.’”

  A German communiqué delivered to the pressroom read, From now on, every enemy bombing of German civilians will be answered by five times as many German planes bombing English and French cities.

  Lea heard the news, but her problems with the Reich pressed closer to home. Mother’s Day in Germany had long been hard for her, but never as demeaning as now. The Cross of Honor was publicly awarded to women who had borne four or more healthy children for the Reich. But to have borne none was shameful, an ignominy that could not be ignored, one that members of the Nazi Women’s Party noted. Lea did her best to smile, to hold her head up as women of Oberammergau paraded from church, proudly displaying their medals of honor.

  Just outside the church door, Lea looked up to find the eyes of Maximillion Grieser boring into her, uncharacteristically full of compassion. The unexpected sympathy made her misstep. Friederich caught her hand. When they straightened and regained their pacing, Lea glimpsed Maximillion staring at her husband with nothing short of contempt—a thing which unnerved her more.

  Friederich kept his hand at the small of her back, as if willing strength into his wife’s spine. But at Oma’s home, alone in their room, Lea gave way and wept.

  Lea knew that Oma tried to keep the others in the kitchen, to divert their attention from her granddaughter’s room, and she was grateful.

  But later, when a soft knock came at their door and Amelie was gently pushed inside, Lea was even more grateful. No arms around her neck so filled her heart as did Amelie’s. They needed one another, and that made the little girl’s hugs all the sweeter. Lea had no words, and Amelie didn’t need them. Even the few signs they shared seemed extravagant. After a time, the two drew Friederich into their precious circle. And Lea prayed they would have one another always.

  52

  IN MID-MAY when the First Mountain Division entered French territory, Friederich thanked God for his limitations, that he was considered unfit for service. He could only imagine the cruelty his old unit would be ordered to wreak on the Jews of France. Gratefully, he returned to his woodcarving, thankful that he’d lost only one eye, that he still had the use of both hands.

  Lea stopped by the shop from time to time, but she was not Friederich’s most frequent visitor.

  Though Heinrich Helphman did not return the Christkind, the little boy haunted Friederich’s shop each afternoon—as regular as the clock over Friederich’s workbench.

  Heinrich leaned over the carving table, watching Friederich’s push and pull of the knife. “Did Frau Hartman give you the Christmas wood I brought?”

  “Ja, ja, she did. That was very kind of you, Heinrich. I appreciate it. Though I must admit, I would like it best if you’d return the image I carved.”

  The little boy ignored the hint. “Will you carve another Christkind with it, Herr Hartman? I know you will! You’re the best woodcarver in all of Oberammergau.”

  Friederich laughed. “I think you’re prejudiced. There are many more accomplished than I.”

  “But you carve the most beautiful faces, the best smiles.”

  “Do I?” Friederich smiled at the praise.

  “Ja, they are the smiles of angels. I think even Herr Hitler could find no fault in them—nor his doctors or nurses either.”

  Friederich looked up at the child, turning his head to better see him, and frowned at his strange remark. But Heinrich flushed and stepped back from the woodcarving table, as though he’d said something he ought not.

  “Heinrich? What is it?”

  The boy shook his head, worry filling his eyes. “I must go, Herr Hartman. I’ll see you tomorrow!” Heinrich grabbed his schoolbooks and tore from the shop.

  Friederich followed the boy to the door and watched him race over the streets and out of sight. “Heinrich!” he called. But the child never turned.

  Friederich scratched his chin. He was tempted to go after him, to see what was behind this glimpse into the boy’s odd behaviors. But he was late in filling Nativity orders, and a game knee was no match for Heinrich’s young and pumping legs. Friederich closed the shop door, allowing the bell overhead to jingle, and limped to his workbench.

  53

  BY THE TIME yellow daisies and monkshood, large blue harebells, sweet butterfly orchids, and meadowsweet with long white tassels spread across the Alpine meadows, Rachel’s fears of Gerhardt discovering her photograph on the magazine cover began to fade. Maybe the magazine never reached Berlin. Maybe Gerhardt’s found a new obsession. Maybe we’re safe. It sounded too good to be true.

  It seemed less important when, in May, the BBC reported that old women in Belgium trudged the roads, carrying crying babies in their arms as they followed young mothers burdened down by their families’ belongings—and pursued by relentless German tanks.

  When reports followed that German forces were halfway from the French border to Reims, on their way to devour Paris, Rachel left the room. She could listen to no more of the plundering of small French villages, of farmland trampled and livestock shot, of unmilked cows left bellowing beside the roadway, of the raping of women and girls at will. This in the name of creating a master race, a thousand-year Reich of horror! She retched in the kitchen sink,
then washed the filth away.

  In the name of advancing racial purification, the German army relocated elderly Tyrolians to Oberammergau and surrounding villages. The irony of taking those considered inferior and moving them among the “German elite” was not lost on Rachel.

  The first week the Tyrolians appeared in the village streets, Rachel, on her way to theatre class, saw the backs of a crowd of children gathered, jumping up and down, calling and jeering. Such scenes were rare in Oberammergau, and her heart tightened in her chest.

  She edged the crowd, keeping her head down. A group of five Hitler Youth had surrounded an old man. They were teasing him, calling him names Rachel couldn’t quite capture—some sort of slang, she supposed—and knocked the hat from the old man’s head. The poor man, doing his best to maintain his dignity, bent down to retrieve his treasure, but the youths kicked his hat farther down the street, swiping the swollen knuckles of his arthritic hand with their boots.

  Women bordering the group turned away, and Rachel heard one whisper loudly to another, “Well, we didn’t want them anyway. There’s no more rooms, and they eat what little we have. Why couldn’t the Führer send them somewhere else?”

  Two younger children from Rachel’s class had wormed their way through the crowd and, following suit, clapped and jeered from the curb. Rachel feared trying to stop the bullying, feared the attention it might draw to herself, but she pushed through the crowd and grabbed the two children’s hands. “You’re going to be late for class, and you know I won’t abide that. Come with me now.”

  “But we want to—”

  “Now—come!” And she herded the young children into the building.

  Why grown people tolerated such cruelty escaped her. But the Hitler Youth were strong, robust boys, and their bullying was nearly encouraged, nearly out of control.