About mid afternoon we leave the restaurant. Romy and Jan decide to take a taxi to their hotel.
“Well, Friedrich, it was nice meeting you. I hope that you look after Emma.” Romy shakes my hand warmly, but I detect a glint of animosity in her eyes. This is a subtler reaction than that I encountered in the group at the lunch hall and library all those years ago, but in meanness it is equal. Then it was strangers, this time it is family.
Jan merely nods in my direction and they both turn to chat briefly with Edgar, Tessa and Emma. Eventually they hug and kiss, deftly avoiding me, and then flag down a taxi. As the taxi speeds away they wave warmly without actually looking in my direction, disappearing into the afternoon traffic.
I feel gutted.
Inside Edgar’s Mercedes-Benz the silence is deafening. Finally Tessa turns around to me. “Friedrich, I noticed that you didn’t eat anything. Weren’t you hungry?”
“Sorry, no. I am feeling a bit queasy.”
“You should have said something. You could have ordered soup, instead of meat or chicken. Or even grilled fish.”
“That’s all right. Really. I will eat at home tonight.”
Back home, we enter the house and Emma heads straight up to bed without saying a word to me. I don’t feel that I can mend this with some piano-playing. We are past that.
I follow her upstairs. The door to her room is closed. I enter mine. The adjoining door has been firmly closed too.
For the first time since I left Bremen I feel alone, frightened and lost. Then I had no emotional connection to anyone. I was grounded in my own sense of self; my own being; my identity and my home. Since then I have gone through a radical transformation. I am no longer a middle-class undergraduate from Bremen. I am a year away from becoming a doctor. I have made a life for myself with someone who has become near and dear to me; I am now firmly part of her family.
Except, the confrontation this afternoon has brought to the surface all that we have been avoiding since the troubles began in Germany. Ironically, Hitler was meant to quell the turmoil, revive the economy, reinvigorate the nation and by doing so restore Germany to pride and prosperity. He has done all that, but also by the victimisation of the Jews, the annexation of territories and his hostile speeches directed towards Germany’s neighbours, he is alienating those of us who merely want to exist in a world that is not just Aryan.
I am just a person. I never thought of myself other than in terms of my societal status, my ambitions, my family and my dreams. Nowhere in that is there anything reflecting the path that Hitler is carving for Germany. Yet he has forced me, by his hostility, intransigence and persecution, to make a choice. I ran away because I was uncomfortable; now I am unwelcome. Paradoxically, he is driving me back to Germany.
I am confused. A few hours ago, I had a plan. I was going to become a doctor, return to Bremen for a year or two, have my loans discharged, come back to Utrecht and resume my life. Simple. But nothing is ever that simple.
Underneath that surface of naivety were bubbling unresolved issues that Romy has stoked into a fire to burn down my life. The bedroom door closing signifies an end to what has been the most wonderful relationship that I will perhaps ever know. But I can’t blame everything on Hitler. I lied. I can’t deny that. I never mailed that letter to Brigitte. I conducted a correspondence in secret with Johann and later with Martin. I learnt things that in a trusting relationship I ought to have shared with Emma.
But I didn’t. Self-preservation? Cowardice? Shying away from facing problems in the hope that they would just go away? But they never do. They just crowd around the periphery of my life as so many ghosts that eventually take on a life of their own and ambush me. As happened today.
I have no one to blame but myself.
It is the flaw in my character. Bremen. Utrecht. I am still the same person; I really haven’t learnt anything, even though I’m now a year away from graduating. Now my plans have been brought forward by a year. Looks like I will be graduating at my old alma mater, Leipzig.
I look up at the top of my wardrobe. There’s the duffel and rucksack that I haven’t laid eyes on since I unpacked my belongings and started my life in Utrecht; the life that has now been abruptly ended.
I take them both down and shake the dust off. I rest them on the bed and commence packing. I am not going to have room for everything; I have accumulated a great deal more than what I arrived with. So I walk back downstairs and look for a carton or another bag.
I re-enter my room with a box and a canvas bag. Emma is sitting on the bed. Her face is red, her eyes are puffed, and the little mascara that she put on for lunch is smeared down her cheeks.
“So, Becker, just pack your things and sneak out?”
I drop the box and bag on the floor and sit next to her on the bed. I am utterly devastated.
“You know, when I set eyes on you for the first time, I knew instinctively that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with you. I believed that you were the perfect man for me. Until now.”
I remain speechless.
“Aren’t you going to say something?”
“Nobody is perfect, Emma.”
“I am listening.”
“I am weak.”
“So, things get tough or uncomfortable for you, you just run away, is that it?”
“No. That’s not it. But I don’t know how to fix this.”
“Meaning what?”
“Emma, I have a family. I love them. And I don’t know how to bridge the gap between my home and family here, and my family in Germany.”
We remain silent for a while and then Emma asks the question that I had been hoping she never would.
“You know, Friedrich, the afternoon you went out to mail the letter to your sister. When you were gone for a while. Did you ever mail the letter?”
I don’t answer.
“I thought so. May I ask why?”
I stay silent. Hearing myself tell the truth would hurt me more than hearing Emma do it. I just can’t bear the pain of my weakness.
“Let me ask this in a different way: supposing we get married next year, become a family; you know, like we planned. Would you fight for your children, for me?”
I shake my head in desperation.
“Is that a no?”
“No. It is not. It’s just that I never imagined myself in that predicament.”
“I see. Tell me something else: if I had not come out just now to face you, would you have just left?”
No answer.
“I just refuse to believe that I misread you this badly. But apparently, I have. So what is the plan?”
“Well, I was going to visit my family in Bremen before starting next term. It’s been three years. I’ll tell them about us face to face, then come back and finish my final year.” I am addicted to my lies; it’s like an opiate that sates my weakness.
“Really? And you couldn’t tell me this before leaving?”
“I was going to write a note.”
“A note?!”
“I will only be gone for a few weeks over the New Year and then return.”
Emma casts her eyes around the room. “From what I can see here you were packing your whole life to take with you.”
“In a way.”
“So you were leaving?”
“I was going to take a room at the dormitory, let things settle between us, and then, if you still want me back, return here.”
“I don’t understand.”
I let my exasperation sink into my tone. “Emma, I sat through an entire lunch being humiliated by your sister-in-law. No one, no one spoke up for me. So what I am supposed to think?”
“Has anyone asked you to leave?”
I silently stand up and pick up the box and bag and take them back downstairs. I return upstairs to find Emma packing just the rucksack for me. I thought for a moment that I had an easy exit from my dilemma, but now I am back to being undecided.
I pick up the rucksack and head downstairs.
I call the Bergens and let them know that I am going home for the New Year. No, Emma is not coming with me.
We walk silently to the bus stop. The bond of trust between us has been broken, as has the intimacy that we shared hitherto. It is up to me to restore both by returning in a few weeks.
We hug closely, but without the warmth and depth that have marked our relationship from the outset.
“Don’t forget me. Us.”
I nod my head to reassure her, and embrace her once again.
As the bus pulls away from the station I look back to see Emma standing under the awning: a small, solitary figure, waving weakly. I try to wave back confidently, but I can’t find the strength.
Within hours I am back in Nijmegen and then, with a short delay, cross into Germany. This is not the country that I left in 1934. There is vibrancy in the air, but also a sense of intimidating tension.
I am excited to be back, but perturbed that a life that I lived for three years has evaporated with nigh an iota of regret in a course of a few hours. I don’t understand how I can be that ephemeral. And maybe that is the factor that defines my weakness: that I can’t hold on to anything for any length of time.
In a few hours I will be in Rackelsweg, my home street in Bremen. Whether I stay or return to Utrecht will depend not on me, but on whether my family and Nazi Germany welcome me back or make me feel unwelcome.
GRÜNEWALD S-BAHN STATION, BERLIN
WINTER 1942
Friedrich Becker stood on the platform, watching the train being loaded. People shoved in through the doors like cattle: young, old, women, children, the frail and the sick. They arrived every half-hour or so in trucks that pulled up next to the empty carriages. The trucks barely stopped before the tarp was pulled back and the occupants were literally thrown out and herded to the waiting carriages.
This was his third assignment since he voluntarily enlisted in the Schutzstaffel in November 1939, to forestall conscription to the Wehrmacht. The latter was inevitable when, in June of that same year, Hitler invaded Poland, forcing the British to declare war on Germany. Two years later, also in June, Hitler shredded the Non-Aggression Pact with Stalin and launched a war against the Soviets. It was a foregone conclusion that, as a Wehrmacht conscript, Friedrich would end up either on the Western Front fighting against the British or, worse yet, on the Eastern Front against the Bolsheviks. In either circumstance he would be deployed in a combat unit as an active soldier or in an auxiliary capacity as a medic. Regardless, he wasn’t interested in dying for the Third Reich.
From the outset the Nazis’ vitriolic diatribes and violent methods repulsed him. He had heard them often enough on the radio and seen them in print and posters - Hitler, Goebbels and Streicher - and frequently witnessed their acolytes on the streets bullying homosexuals, socialists and Jews. This was not the Germany that he grew up in; neither was this the country that he wanted to devote his life to as a doctor. He understood and sympathised with the plight of the masses, the unemployment, the worthless mark and the demise of Germany post World War I, but the medicine that he would prescribe for its healing was not fascism and unchecked aggression against its citizens and neighbours.
Just the same, he was not prepared to flee; he preferred to wait and hope for an outcome that would see Hitler and his cronies swept into the dustbins of history and Germany restored to its former pride and glory. But with each passing year from the rise of the National Socialists, the situation deteriorated. Six years after Hitler assumed the role of Führer, Germany was at war with the world, and many of its former citizens were being alienated, forced from their homes and now subjected to deportation. How could the price of restoring Germany’s prosperity come at the cost of such depravity?
Friedrich dared not confide his deep misgivings to his parents and sister. They would deem it unpatriotic to criticise the National Socialists and Hitler - after all, they were the ruling party in the Reichstag, regardless of their politics and polemics. That only left him with the option of sharing his misgivings with his university colleagues and erstwhile friends from Bremen, but in this climate fraught with fear and suspicion that could be downright perilous.
With his doctor’s degree commenced in Utrecht and completed in Germany he felt that the safest and most prudent course to steer would be a quasi-medical administrative role within the current regime, a position that would also shield him from active duty. However, he soon learned that enrolling in this regime meant taking on a party hue.
He was assigned the non-commissioned rank of Unterscharführer, sergeant, in the SS and appointed to work in a recruitment centre in Berlin. After a year at the centre, providing medicals for potential SS recruits, including the moronic testing for racial purity, he was transferred to a more august medical facility that catered exclusively to the Reich’s elite: commanding officers of the Wehrmacht and the SS, high party officials, their wives and children.
At first he was relieved, albeit equally sickened by having to spend his working days cheek by jowl with the very people he abhorred, that he didn’t have to unctuously exhibit the requisite enthusiasm for the young bloods who so zealously joined the SS on the Nazis’ mission of eradicating undesirables from the Reich. But if the mood was less exuberant here, it was also much darker, the solemnity cast by the ominous presence of so many Nazis officials at the highest levels of military and government. There was no reckless bantering here of ‘bullying Untermenschen’, ‘vandalising Jewish property’, ‘terrorising communists and Marxists’ and such taunts. Instead there was the ever-watchful eye of Gestapo agents lurking in the corners, eavesdropping on conversations, reading private notes and files, interrogating staff and doctors about their patients. Forever looking for the tiniest smidgen of disloyalty, a single morsel of casual conversation that might uncover a conspiracy, the least inadvertent remark made in total jest that might lead to immediate demotion or expulsion.
Friedrich didn’t care about that. No one ever told him anything incriminating, and even if they did, he wouldn’t pass it on. Besides, he couldn’t care less about what happened to these people, or about their motives. Nevertheless he gradually got used to the work, the wives and children lightening the sombre mood.
But then the new decrees came in curtailing the activities of Jewish doctors and medical and nursing staff, and everything changed for the worse.
Esteemed colleagues that he worked alongside were summarily denigrated and demoted to lab technicians collecting and processing samples. One particular professor, who had lectured Friedrich at Leipzig and was the facility’s erstwhile director, was demoted to a staff doctor and then again to work under supervision in the lab. Competent medical staff were demoted to janitorial services: cleaning rooms; making beds; emptying chamber pots.
If the humiliation of demotion was not enough, erstwhile Jewish doctors and staff were subjected to daily denigrations and degradations. Singing Nazi anthems in the morning and at night. Saluting Nazi officials with anti-Jewish proclamations. And to top it all their pay was reduced to a pittance.
Becker had witnessed this before in other walks of life, but these people were close to his heart and home; it affected him directly. As did the invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940, casting a shadow over the lives of people that he personally knew in Utrecht. What gnawed at him the most was his inability to speak out and vent his frustration. He wore the uniform; he was beholden to the creed and committed to the allegiance.
He could, however, do his job lackadaisically. Blame the inefficiency and delays on the lack of competent doctors to render qualified opinions and accurate diagnosis, and experienced staff to deliver prompt results. The inference was clear: You got rid of the good doctors and medical staff; now we are stuck with subpar. His sudden poor performance and insouciance came to the attention of his commanding officer, SS-Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Nieland. He decided to “rub Becker’s nose in it” and transferred him to work at the train station. On issuing the order, he smirked to his Leutn
ant: “See how that softie likes this posting. This will toughen him up.”
And now Friedrich was here, standing on the platform watching the deportees huddling together as they clambered into the train carriages, their faces terrified, confused; carrying their meagre possessions, yearning for the nightmare that had begun in the small hours of the morning to eventually end. They were told that the resettlement was for their protection.
He stood impassively erect, careful not to betray his displeasure again, as they were packed onto the carriages, oftentimes overflowing when the giant wooden doors were finally sealed and the next carriage was starting to fill up. No food or water, and one bucket for waste to last them on a harrowing journey that could last several days.
He knew that his superior, the station commander, SS-Standartenführer Wolff, was looking for the slightest excuse to pack him off to the Eastern Front. Wolff knew of Becker’s previous record. On more than one occasion he’d spat out at him his suspicion that Becker had links to trade unions, socialists and other subversives. He’d even hinted that Becker might have homosexual tendencies that could account for his squeamishness. All false. But in this current climate, one of terror and betrayal, Becker knew that a mere rumour could derail his stationing in Berlin.
If he could ride out this assignment, Hitler the madman was bound to fail and Germany would be restored to sanity. Then he could go home and resume his career, which is where he wanted to be. The question in his mind was not whether he could, but whether he would be allowed to do so. When this madness ended, would Germans of conscience be excused from complicity and allowed to resume their lives?
He could stand here and watch passively, ostensibly keeping the order, but as his beloved Milton wrote, They also serve who only stand and wait. In another context, he would be complicit.
THE MADNESS LOCKER Page 11
