by Gerald Green
“Combat? How did you think I got my Iron Cross? Verdun, Chemins des Dames, Metz. I went through it all.”
Mrs. Helms looked uneasy. “Let’s pray there are no more wars.”
“I’ll drink to that, madame,” my grandfather said.
Muller sat down next to Hans. There was a vague smile on his face as he studied my grandfather’s white head.
“Understand your son-in-law was born in Warsaw,” he said suddenly. “Still technically a Polish citizen.” “What of it?”
“Just wondering where your family loyalties are, considering the international situation.”
“I don’t give a damn about politics,” Grandpa Palitz said.
My mother, overhearing him as she danced, came back to the table. The music stopped for a moment. Inga and Karl and my father also gathered around.
“We don’t discuss politics,” my mother said firmly. “My husband considers himself as German as I do. He went to medical school here and he’s practiced here.”
“No offense, madame,” Muller said. Again, that flat, cold smile widened his mouth. It was a smile I was to encounter in so many of them over the years. Look at the photos of the end of the Warsaw ghetto. And you will see this smile on the faces of the conquerors, the murderers of women and children. Study the photographs of the naked women lined up outside the chambers at Auschwitz, then see the faces of the armed guards. Smiling. Always some strange humor moves them to smile. Why? Is it a smile of shame? Are they hiding their guilt with laughter? I doubt it. Perhaps it is nothing more than the essence of evil; a distillation of everything that is vile and destructive in man.
Tamar, my wife, who is a psychologist, shrugs her shoulders when I talk of this. “They smile because they smile,” she says, with a sabra’s cynicism. “It is funny to them when others suffer and die.”
My father now supported my mother’s reluctance to discuss politics with Muller or any of the Helms family. In his polite way, he said he was an expert only on things like influenza, and setting fractures; politics were not his field.
But Grandpa Palitz was not the man to take a hint. He leaned across the table—summer wasps and bees now buzzed around the fruit and the melting ice cream—and leveled his pipe at Muller and Helms.
“Hindenberg, there was a man for you,” Grandpa said.
“A patriot, yes,” Muller said. “But old-fashioned. Behind the times.”
“Bah!” my grandfather said. “We need a few like him today. Some honest generals. The army should run that gang right out of office.”
Muller’s eyes were almost closed. “What gang?”
“You know who I’m talking about. A few good army men could handle them in an afternoon.”
Again, there was an embarrassed silence. My parents were shaking their heads. Mama touched her father’s arm. “Not today, Papa, please.”
Inga came to the rescue. In her lilting voice she said, “I can’t believe it, Karl! The militarists are all on your side of the family!”
People laughed. My father made a joke about Grandpa reenlisting. Mr. and Mrs. Helms and their son were silent. Muller started to whisper something in Mr. Helms’ ear, then stopped.
Inga tried to liven up the wedding party. “Why don’t we all sing? What would anyone like to sing?”
She gestured to the accordion player to join us. Soon Inga was making people get to their feet, gather in a circle.
Inga had this power, this gift, of getting things done, of influencing people—not cruelly, or by playing the domineering female, but by the gayness and liveliness of her personality. She seemed to enjoy every moment of her life, and she had the gift of transferring this joy to others. Once she took Anna and me to the zoo for the day, and I cannot remember enjoying the animals so much, walking until my feet ached, but happy to be with her and with Karl. Yet oddly, she was not a well-educated girl—business school was the limit of her training—and she was not effusive, or loud, or boisterous. She was quite simply alive, loved life, and made one feel the same way.
“Do you know the Lorelei?” asked my mother.
The accordion player bowed his head. “I’m sorry, madame. But Heine …”
“Heine is forbidden?” my mother asked, incredulous.
“You see, the party’s musical department says—”
“Please,” my mother said.
“Go on,” Inga said. She kissed the musician on his forehead. “You must play it for a bride. I love it.”
He began to play. Karl put his arm around Inga, Inga put her arm around my father, and so on. But the Helms family, while joining in the song, seemed a bit apart from us. The old melody, the old words lingered in the hot, summery air.
I do not know why this confronts me,
This Sadness, this echo of pain,
A curious legend still haunts me,
Still haunts and obsesses my brain …
Uncle Moses nudged me as I walked by. “I’d have preferred to have heard Raisins and Almonds.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. He was a kind and devoted man, but he was—different. Polish Jews, my mother often said (not in any critical way), were just different.
“Singing is boring,” Anna said. “Look what I brought along.”
She had a kid’s soccer ball, and she bounced it off my head. Soon I was chasing her, and we were kicking the ball on the lawn in back of the restaurant. I teased her, pushing the ball past her, faking her out of position, every now and then letting her get the best of me. Once she slipped on the grass and went down.
“You did that on purpose,” Anna cried.
“An accident!”
“I’ll show you, you rat!”
And she kicked the ball over my head—and into a group of men dining in a protected little area of the garden.
I ran after it. Then I stopped. One of the men had picked the ball up and was holding it out. “Yours, kid?”
“Yes,” I said.
There were three of them. Youngish, sort of heavy. All wore the brown shirts, baggy brown trousers and black boots of the Storm Troopers. Each wore a swastika armband—the black spiked cross in a white circle, the rest of the band scarlet. I looked at their faces. Ordinary Berlin faces, men you might see in any beer garden on any Sunday, drinking beer, smoking. Except for the uniforms.
I knew who they were, and what they thought of us, and what they were doing to us. Just a year ago, I’d gotten into a street fight with some of them. I’d got my eye blackened, knocked one of them down, and then I’d run like the wind, over fences and into alleys to escape them.
“What are you looking at, kid?” the man who held the ball asked.
“Nothing.”
Anna was several yards behind me. She saw them too, and she began to back away. I wanted to say to her, Don’t, don’t show them you’re afraid, they don’t know we’re Jews. Her face was pale and she kept moving away. She seemed to understand, perhaps better than I did, that these were our enemies, that nothing we did, or said, or pretended to be, could save us from that blind, unreasoning hate. Yet the men now seemed indifferent to us.
The ball was booted at me. I hit it with my head, in a perfect arc, and when it came down, I kicked it toward Anna. I had the feeling of a narrow escape, although from what I was not sure.
Anna and I stopped under the shade of a laurel tree. We looked again at the three Storm Troopers.
“The wedding party’s ruined,” she said.
“No it isn’t,” I said. “They’re nothing to us.”
We could hear our family and the Helmses, singing on the other side of the hedges.
“Come on,” I said. “I’ll play goalie and you try to kick it past me.”
“No. I don’t want to play soccer, and I don’t want to sing.”
She ran off. I tossed the ball gently at her and hit her in the backside. Normally Anna, spunky, always ready to tease, would have turned and tried to get even with me. But she just kept running. I looked once more at the men in b
rown shirts, and I wondered to myself whether we should all be running.
Erik Dorf’s Diary
Berlin
September 1935
Marta complained again today of fatigue. She has not been right since Laura’s birth. I insisted she see a doctor.
Having just moved into this tiny flat in this quarter (where I lived years ago as a boy), I recalled a certain Dr. Josef Weiss on Groningstrasse. My parents had used him, and sure enough, his office is still there in a four-story limestone building. He and his family still live in the upper stories, and his clinic occupies the ground floor.
Dr. Weiss, a soft-spoken, rather weary-looking man, examined Marta thoroughly, and then, as gently as possible, said that he suspected she had a slight systolic murmur. Marta and I must have looked shocked, but he assured us it was of a minor nature, probably connected with her anemia. He prescribed something to strengthen her blood, and told her not to overexert herself.
As he chatted with her, I studied the dark paneled walls of his office. Diplomas. Certificates. Photographs of wife and children, including one of a young bridal couple. It makes no difference to me, but I remember my parents saying that Dr. Weiss was a Jew, but a very fine one.
The physician, learning that we had two small children at home, suggested a maid a few days a week, and Marta—without shame—told him we could not afford one. He replied that she need not be the perfect Berlin housewife, scrubbing and cleaning all day, although moderate exercise was good for her.
As we were about to leave, he halted me at the door to his waiting room, and remarked that he had once had patients named Dorf. Was I possibly related? I acknowledged that my father had indeed been his patient when I was a small boy, some twelve years ago.
Dr. Weiss seemed touched. He remembered my parents well. Mrs. Weiss used to buy bread and cake from the bakery of Klaus Dorf. How happy he was to see me again! Why hadn’t I mentioned it at the start?
Marta lifted her chin, and with that peculiar North German pride of hers, remarked that her husband, Erik Dorf, lawyer, did not like to ask special favors—of anyone. She didn’t say it cruelly, or to put the doctor in his place. She was merely setting the record straight.
In any event, Dr. Weiss was certainly not offended and he chatted on—how he had cured me of chicken pox when I was six, how he had seen my mother through a severe bout of pneumonia. And how, he asked, were they now? I told him my father was dead, that he had lost the store during the depression, and that my mother was living with relatives in Munich.
He was moved by this, I could see, and said how sad it was that so many good people were hurt during those years. Suddenly he said, “And those wonderful, crusty stollen. On Thursdays?”
I could not help smiling. “Wednesdays. I used to deliver them.”
He seemed almost reluctant to let us leave, as if the memories of my parents’ humble bakery, my youthful services as delivery boy, were pleasing recollections. Marta made a point of saying how far I’d come—a lawyer, paying my way through the university. The doctor agreed. Then we departed through the waiting room. I noticed that his patients seemed, for the most part, poor people.
Later, we sat in a small park and I read the help-wanted advertisements, as I had done for a long time. Night watchman. Warehouseman. Clerk. Hardly anything for a bright young attorney, especially with two young children and a wife to support. Marta has talked of taking a job, but I won’t hear of it. We have no grandparents or other relatives to look after the children, and quite frankly, she isn’t trained for anything. Her old fashioned parents in Bremen thought it improper for women to go to work. She was raised to marry, bear children, cook and go to church.
I remarked that I might have trouble paying the doctor bills, and she responded that if Dr. Weiss was so happy to see me again, and even recalled my father’s stollen, he’d certainly trust me until I found work. Marta is ever the optimist, the planner, the one who looks ahead and sees things getting better.
I’m not that way. Ever since I saw my father lose his business, his store, his self-confidence, and finally his life, I have tended to hide my native moroseness beneath a false cheerful facade. My appearance helps—slender, tall, fair. Marta and I make an attractive couple—she petite and blond, with excellent bearing and graceful hands.
Although it was an extravagance, what with our bills mounting, I bought vanilla ice cream cones for us, and we strolled through the small park. Marta, gently at first, then a bit more firmly, began to lecture me. I am too shy, too self-effacing. I don’t brag to people that I graduated in the top tenth of my law-school class. Why?
How can I explain to her that in my shame over my father’s failure, I find it hard to brag, to thrust myself forward?
She tossed her half-finished cone into a trash bin, and looked annoyed. “You reject my suggestions all the time,” she said. “Erik, please …”
I knew what she wanted, what she wants. I have told her a dozen times I do not want to be a policeman. An uncle of hers has a connection with General Reinhard Heydrich, who is rumored to be one of the most powerful of all the rising new political leaders—heading up the Gestapo, SS and other security services. Marta has never hesitated to say that she thinks I should at least talk to this powerful man. Thousands of young Germans, university men, would give ten years of their life for such a chance. But I am not even a party member. Nor is Marta. We are rather nonpolitical people. Oh, we see every day how things are improving—more jobs, the currency stabilized, factories running. But politics are beyond me.
I have told her that my father may have even been a Socialist at one time. The Nazis would surely find out. What then?
But this time, in the park, she was adamant. She said I would hurt her poor heart, that I owed it to the children, that perhaps what was wrong with me was that I was not more wholeheartedly in step with the new Germany. I reminded her that for the past few years I have slaved over law books, worked part-time in an insurance firm, barely managed to keep my health and my sanity, and hence have small time for politicians, or parades, or rallies.
In the end she won. I agreed to ask her uncle to make an appointment for me with Heydrich. After all, I love and respect Marta, and perhaps she is sharper than I am in realizing that the new government offers new opportunities.
And so we put our arms around each other’s backs, and like young lovers, walked down the tree-lined street. At a kiosk I glanced at the posters—Hitler in knight’s armor, warnings not to buy from Jews, exhortations to all to work harder. Maybe he’s right.
Today, September 20, I was ushered into Reinhard Heydrich’s office for an interview.
He is a tall, handsome, impressive man. No man is better suited to wear the black uniform of the SS. He holds several posts—chief of the Gestapo, chief of the Security Service. He reports directly to Reichsführer Himmler, the head of the SS, the “army within an army,” that loyal legion of men sworn to uphold Nazi doctrine, racial purity, the security of Germany.
As Heydrich read my curriculum vitae, I studied him. He was a wonderful athlete, I’ve heard (he still is a superb physical specimen), and an accomplished violinist. In fact, a violin rested on a stand nearby. A Mozart cantata was open. I know a little about him—former naval officer, organizer for the party, a brilliant theoretician, a man with a deep belief in the need for security and order, and the limitless power of a police force.
His manner was polite. I saw nothing in him to explain the street rumors I’ve heard (from left-wing types who attended law school with me) that in the party he is known as “the evil young god of death.” How wrong people can be! I saw a refined, intelligent man, thirty-one years old.
Abruptly, he looked up and asked me what made me think I was suited for work in the SS special branches he commanded, such as the Security Service or the Gestapo.
To be candid, I did not know what to say, so I took the easiest way out. I told him the truth. “Sir, I need a job,” I said.
This amused him
. At once he revealed the kind of insightful man he is—seeing through people clearly, aware of motives, prescient, a born psychologist. He replied that I had given him a frank and refreshing answer. All sorts of frauds and fakes came to him for jobs, and here was I, a bright young lawyer, making no long speeches about my love of Fatherland and Führer, but merely after a job.
Was he taunting me? No, he was sincere. Still, there was something mocking in his metallic blue eyes, and when he turned back my way, it was as if I were looking at a different person. The two sides of his face— a handsome face—seemed disparate, mismatched. Was he enjoying some kind of inner joke, some cynical laughter, at my expense? I’m not certain.
Heydrich talked about the party, the new government, the end of the corrupt and inefficient parliament. He told me that police power, properly used, is the true power of the state. I suppose I should have argued. I learned other notions in law school. What about courts? The legal process? Human rights? But I was too awed by him to respond.
“Given modern technical knowledge, and the patriotism of the German people,” he said, “there are no limits to what we can do, no enemies who can overcome us.”
I must have looked confused, for he laughed, and asked me if I really knew the distinctions between the SS, the SD, the Gestapo, the RSHA. When I confessed I did not, he laughed out loud and slapped the table. “Splendid, Dorf. We have trouble keeping them apart ourselves sometimes. No matter. They all report to me, and of course to our beloved Reichsführer, Herr Himmler.”
He then asked me how I felt about Jews, and I answered that I had never given them much thought. Again, he turned the hard, crooked side of his face toward me. Quickly, I added that I certainly agreed that they had an influence far out of proportion to their numbers in such fields as journalism, commerce, banking and the professions, and that perhaps this was bad for Germany and for the Jews themselves.
Heydrich nodded. He then launched on a major thesis of his—an expansion on the Führer’s own words in Mein Kampf. Some of it was hard to follow, but it seemed to boil down to the fact that just as Bolshevism, to succeed in Russia, needed a class enemy, so the Nazi movement, to succeed in Germany, needs a racial enemy. Hence the Jews.
