Saving Amelie

by Cathy Gohlke

  “By the time you got around to kissing me, I’d washed that gunk off my face, so you never kissed that old woman,” Rachel countered.

  He grinned and sat back.

  “This woman’s a lot fatter,” she mumbled, casting what she hoped was an appealing glance his way.

  “This woman—this fabulous woman—is carrying our perfect baby.”

  “You forget whom you’re talking to—there are no perfect babies.”

  He smiled. “Lea will tell you that every baby is perfect, no matter the packaging.”

  “She would, wouldn’t she? And Friederich will say each child is rejoiced over with singing,” Rachel remembered.

  “And Oma will say, ‘Knit by God in its mother’s womb.’”

  Rachel sat back, thankful as their little one kicked, almost on cue. Yes, she will. I just hope they’ll truly be glad to see us.

  But there was no need to wait, to wonder, until they reached the station.

  “Look!” Jason pointed out the window of the train. “On the hillside!”

  Wildly jumping up and down with a bouquet of Alpine flowers crushed in one hand and waving fiercely with the other arm was a beautiful young woman, flaxen hair splayed round her face in the late-afternoon breeze.

  “Kristine! She’s the image of Kristine!” Rachel wept, waving wildly in return.

  Beside her was a boy—a young man—who could only be Heinrich Helphman grown up, running, suddenly tugging Amelie along with him toward the station.

  As the train slowed and finally lurched to a stop, the whistle blew one long and final blast. Rachel spied Lea and Friederich eagerly searching the windows of the train. Holding hands. They looked a little more mature about the face, perhaps a tad thicker about the waist, but two parts of a lovely whole. Oma leaned forward in a wheeled chair beside them, hands clasped beneath her chin, her face a rapture of joy, of hope and expectation.

  Lea’s eyes found Rachel’s and she whooped for joy, pulling Friederich, still limping, with her, closer to the tracks.

  Rachel clasped Jason’s hand in both her own and pressed them to her heart. We’re home. We’re truly home!

  Note to Readers

  ON THE NIGHT of May 10, 1933, less than four months after Adolf Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor, members of the SS and the SA (brownshirts), Nazi students, and Hitler Youth trooped into Bebelplatz, a square near Humboldt University in Berlin, where they lit a raging bonfire and sent approximately twenty thousand books up in flames.

  In 2009, my daughter and I joined an emotional anniversary ceremony on the very spot. Nearby, a plaque, engraved with a line from Heinrich Heine’s play Almansor (1821) reads, Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen—“That was only a prelude; where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people.”

  I doubt that in 1933 any of those students, so intent on burning books and championing their new Führer, imagined that within a few short years they would be ordered to force Jewish men, women, and children from their homes and ultimately into cattle cars en route to concentration camps, or that they would eventually help load their bodies into crematoriums.

  I’ve never understood how one of the most enlightened nations of the world was seduced and reduced to stripping portions of its populace of rights to citizenship and human dignity, to living complicit in the murder of entire groups of people. What made Nazis believe that their wants and needs were most important, that they constituted a superior race, and that anyone their leadership deemed inferior should be eliminated? Why did the people—and the church, in particular—fail to rise up in protest? And if such a drastic change in culture and behavior happened then, could it happen today? Could it happen in America?

  In my quest for answers, I traced the evolution of the pseudoscience of eugenics in the United States and Germany, with its determination to eradicate disease and its design to eliminate certain bloodlines while promoting others, along with Hitler’s fascination with eugenics and his writing of Mein Kampf, outlining his intentions. I also explored Hitler’s rise to power, the evolution of the Third Reich, and the events of World War II. I needed to understand how it all began—why any of this madness made sense to those living at that time.

  The answers I’ve gleaned are varied and complex, and saddest of all, not altogether a thing of the past. At the most basic level, I believe that fear, greed, arrogance, and the desire to be above others—the cause of so much of the world’s strife—encompassed a nation grasping at straws for a savior, a nation desperate to climb from the pit in which they found themselves after the devastation of World War I and the long-term consequences of the Treaty of Versailles. I also believe much truth can be captured in this familiar saying: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a dissident German pastor, was one of the few who early recognized the danger of Hitler’s absolute power and his insistence on total allegiance to him rather than to any other, including Jesus Christ. Bonhoeffer wrote, “The Church has only one altar, the altar of the Almighty . . . before which all creatures must kneel. . . . He who seeks anything other than this must keep away; he cannot join us in the house of God. . . . The Church has only one pulpit, and from that pulpit faith in God will be preached, and no other faith, and no other will than the will of God, however well-intentioned.”

  Bonhoeffer also realized, after reading Mein Kampf, that Hitler was systematically setting about doing exactly what he’d written he would do. He saw the horrific ramifications for Jews in the Nuremberg Laws and the Aryan Clause, which stripped German Jews of their citizenship and rights and eliminated Hebrew Christians from all public and church roles. Historically there were tens of thousands of Hebrew Christians in Germany. Under Hitler’s regime, nearly all were killed in the camps beside their Jewish brethren and many other groups the Reich sought to eliminate.

  Bonhoeffer saw the burning of synagogues for the hate crimes they were, saw sterilizations and “mercy killings” of the physically and mentally handicapped as murder; he saw that the church, by not protecting Jews or anyone else outside Hitler’s concept of an Aryan ideal, was not living out Jesus’ commandments. And he realized that with the passing of each of Hitler’s edicts, the German people lost their liberty to protest the madness.

  History is one thing. The current, urgent questions are ours: What have we learned? How do we make sure we are not taken unawares, that we are not seduced into giving up our rights and taking away the rights of others? Where do we find the courage to rise from our apathy, our indifference, from political correctness and fear of offending to stand for God’s truth? How do we make certain we keep God on the throne of our hearts and minds, that we do not place political or charismatic leaders or our own comfort and wealth before Him? How do we make certain that we have not deemed ourselves more worthy or important than others whom Jesus died to save?

  I found many of the answers to these questions in Bonhoeffer’s book The Cost of Discipleship. It’s not a simple read. But it’s a book I wish I’d read earlier in life, one that challenges and convicts and draws me into a deeper relationship with Christ. It reminds me that I’m not called to some ethereal monasticism outside this world, but to live, fully equipped by Christ, in this world as His disciple.

  In 2010, my daughter’s new in-laws told my husband and me about a tour they would soon join to Oberammergau to see the Passion Play. They invited us to accompany them, as a couple of spots had opened up on the tour. At the time, I had no plans to set my story in Oberammergau. But after that tour, I began to see the contrast between a people who’d vowed to perform the Passion Play every ten years (and—to the best of their ability—to live that culture) and a regime set on claiming primacy in the hearts and minds of its citizens. It sounded so like the contrasting struggles of the Christian’s journey that I could not resist.

  Some of the events explored in Saving Amelie are real and follow the
historical timeline. For example:

  There was a strong eugenics movement in the United States as well as in Germany and other countries that practiced sterilization. International conferences (including the conference Dr. Kramer and others attend in Scotland) and the sharing of research between countries were common. At the time this story opens, years before Dr. Josef Mengele’s infamous human experiments in Auschwitz, Dr. Verschuer was assisted by Mengele at the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt, where they did extensive research on tuberculosis and on twins. Notes in the epilogue regarding both men are true. Eugenics research was conducted at the Institute in Long Island, though Dr. Kramer is a fictitious character.

  Much of Jason Young’s timeline came from William L. Shirer’s Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934–1941. It is a profoundly different experience to read a diary written as events unfold rather than a history written after the fact.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the books he wrote are real, including Nachfolge, later translated as The Cost of Discipleship. I’ve tried to follow the timeline of Bonhoeffer’s life during these years. However, he did not arrive at the Benedictine monastery in Ettal until later in the fall of 1940. My scene at Ettal with Rachel is fictitious.

  For the sake of story, the villagers of Oberammergau replaced their August 24 King Ludwig’s Fire celebration (an annual event) with the production directed by Rachel and Lea. Though the Munich State Library was not able to conclude whether or not the fires on the mountain were forbidden in 1940, it seemed a fair supposition since the country was under blackout.

  Adolf Hitler attended the Passion Play in 1934. General Dwight D. Eisenhower and his wife, Mamie, attended in 1950.

  Some characters and their activities—like Frau Bergstrom, Father Oberlanger, Curate Bauer, Forestry Chief Schrade, Administrator Raab, the mayor, and the shopkeeper who was arrested for giving extra food to refugees—were, in part, modeled after real people who lived in Berlin or Oberammergau at the time. While they were not connected to the resistance network I have portrayed, each of these characters serves as a reminder that in desperate situations there are those who quietly go about resisting oppressors and helping others in ways they are able. I pray for courage to do the same.

  God’s blessings,

  Cathy Gohlke

  THE GREAT SHIP returned late from her sea trials beyond the shores of Carrickfergus, needing only her sea papers, a last-minute load of supplies, and the Belfast mail before racing to Southampton.

  But in that rush to ferry supplies, a dockworker’s hand was crushed beneath two heavy crates carelessly dropped. The fury and swearing that followed reddened the neck of the toughest man aboard the sturdy supply boat.

  Michael Dunnagan’s eyes and ears spread wide with all the fascination of his fifteen years.

  “You there! Lad! Do you want to make a shilling?”

  Michael, who’d stolen the last two hours of the day from his sweep’s work to run home and scrub before seeing Titanic off, turned at the gruff offer, certain he’d not heard with both ears.

  “Are you deaf, lad? Do you want to make a shilling, I say!” the mate aboard the supply craft called again.

  “I do, sir! I do!” Michael vowed, propelled by wonder and a fear the man might change his mind.

  “Give us a hand, then. My man’s smashed his paw, and we’ve got to get these supplies aboard Titanic. She’s late from her trials and wants to be under way!”

  Michael could not move his feet from the splintered dock. For months he’d slipped from work to steal glimpses of the lady’s growing. He’d spied three years ago as her magnificent keel was laid and had checked week by week as ribs grew into skeleton, as metal plates formed sinew and muscle to strengthen her frame, as decks and funnels fleshed her out. He’d speculated on her finishing, the sure beauty and mystery of her insides. He had cheered, with most of Belfast, as she’d been gently pulled from her berth that morning by tugboats so small with names so mighty that the contrast was laughable.

  To stand on the dock and see her sitting low in the water, her sleek lines lit by electric lights against the cold spring twilight, was a wonder of its own. The idea of stepping onto her polished deck—and being paid to do it—was joyous beyond anything in Michael’s ken.

  But his uncle Tom was aboard Titanic in the stoker hole, shoveling coal for her mighty engines. Michael had snuck to the docks to celebrate the parting from his uncle’s angry fists and lashing belt as much as he’d come to see Titanic herself. He’d never dared to defend himself against the hateful man twice his size, but Michael surely meant to spit a final good-bye.

  “Are you coming or not?” the dockhand barked.

  “Aye!” Michael dared the risk and jumped aboard the supply boat, trying for the nimble footing of a sailor rather than the clunky feet of a sweep. Orders were shouted from every direction. Fancy chairs, crates of food, and kitchen supplies were stowed in every conceivable space. Mailbags flew from hands on dock to hands on deck. As soon as the lines were tossed aboard, the supply craft fairly flew through the harbor.

  Staff of Harland and Wolff—the ship’s designers and builders—firemen, and yard workers not sailing to Southampton stood on Titanic’s deck, ready to be lightered ashore. The supply boat pulled alongside her.

  Michael bent his head, just in case Uncle Tom was among those sent ashore, though he figured it unlikely. He hefted the low end of a kitchen crate and followed it aboard Titanic, repeating in his mind the two words of the only prayer he remembered: Sweet Jesus. Sweet Jesus. Sweet Jesus.

  “Don’t be leaving them there!” An authoritarian sort in blue uniform bellowed at the load of chairs set squarely on the deck. “Bring those along to the first-class reception room!”

  Michael dropped the kitchen crate where he stood. Sweeping a wicker chair clumsily beneath each arm, he followed the corridor-winding trail blazed by the man ahead of him.

  He clamped his mouth to keep it from trailing his toes. Golden oak, carved and scrolled, waxed to a high sheen, swept past him. Fancy patterned carpeting in colors he would have wagered grew only in flowers along the River Shannon made him whistle low. Mahogany steps, grand beyond words, swept up, up to he didn’t know where.

  He caught his breath at the domed skylight above it all.

  Lights, so high he had to crane his neck to see, and spread wider than a man could stretch, looked for all the world to Michael like layers of icicles and stars, twinkling, dangling one set upon the other.

  But Michael gasped as his eyes traveled downward again. He turned away from the center railing, feeling heat creep up his neck. Why the masters of Titanic wanted a statue of a winged and naked child to hold a lamp was more than he could imagine.

  “Oy! Mind what you’re about, lad!” A deckhand wheeled a skid of crates, barely missing Michael’s back. “If we scrape these bulkheads, we’re done for. I’ll not be wanting my pay docked because a gutter rat can’t keep his head.”

  “I’ll mind, sir. I will, sir.” Michael took no offense. He considered himself a class of vermin somewhat lower than a gutter rat. He swallowed and thought, But the luckiest vermin that ever lived!

  “Set them round here,” the fussy man ordered. Immediately the first-class reception room was filled with men and chairs and confounding directions. A disagreement over the placement of chairs broke out between two argumentative types in crisp uniforms.

  The man who’d followed close on Michael’s heels stepped back, muttering beneath his breath, “Young bucks busting their britches.” A minute passed before he shook his head and spoke from the side of his mouth. “Come, me boyo. We’ll fetch another load. Blathering still, they’ll be.”

  But as they turned, the men in uniform forged an agreement and called for Michael to rearrange the chairs. Michael stepped lively, moved each one willingly, deliberately, and moved a couple again, only to stay longer in the wondrous room.

  But as quickly as the cavernous room had filled,
it emptied. The last of the uniformed men was summoned to the dining room next door, and Michael stood alone in the vast hall.

  He started for the passageway, then stopped. He knew he should return to the deck with the other hands and finish loading supplies. But what if he didn’t? What if he just sat down and took his ease? What if he dared stay in the fine room until Titanic reached Southampton? What if he then walked off the ship—simply walked into England?

  Michael’s brow creased in consternation. He sucked in his breath, nearly giddy at the notion: to leave Belfast and Ireland for good and all, never again to feel Uncle Tom’s belt or buckle lashed across his face or shoulders.

  And there was Jack Deegan to consider. When Deegan had injured his back aboard his last ship, he’d struck a bargain with Uncle Tom. Deegan had eagerly traded his discharge book—a stoker’s ticket aboard one of the big liners—for Uncle Tom’s flat and Michael’s sweep wages for twelve months. As cruel as his uncle had always been, experience made Michael fear being left alone with Jack Deegan even more.

  To walk away from Uncle Tom, from Jack Deegan, from the memory of these miserable six years past, and even from the guilt and shame of failing Megan Marie—it was a dream, complex and startling. And it flashed through Michael’s mind in a moment.

  He swallowed. Uncle Tom would be in the stoker hole or firemen’s quarters while aboard ship. Once in Southampton he would surely spend his shore leave at the pubs. Michael could avoid him for this short voyage.

  “Sweet Jesus,” Michael whispered again, his heart drumming a beat until it pounded the walls of his chest. He had begged for years, never believing his prayers had been heard or would be answered.

  Michael waited half a minute. When no one came, he crept cautiously across the room, far from the main entry, and slid, the back side of a whisper, beneath the table nearest the wall.