Let Me Whisper You My Story

by Moya Simons

  The scarf was so long. ‘A strange-looking thing,’ Gertrude said. ‘A nonsense,’ Aunty Gitta had called it. ‘Knit a blanket,’ she’d told Mama. But Mama wouldn’t. She said the scarf was her family. I held it up and looked for myself on the scarf. The red, the blue, the orange, the purple, the green, the pink stripes were all her family.

  Mama, which colour am I?

  I slept that night on the floor on cushions bunched together with an old quilt over me.

  Friedrich called out to me from his bed, before he turned off the bedside lamp:‘I don’t sleep well, so don’t snore or make any noises.’

  Sleeping in a strange room with strange smells and an awful boy there just increased my fear. Some nights I crept under Friedrich’s bed. In the solid darkness, with the world’s longest scarf and Miri’s journal, I felt safer. Often in the morning I would find myself there and not remember having left my own makeshift bed during the night.

  ‘What is that huge scarf that you take to bed with you?’ Friedrich asked. ‘And that journal. Who is Miri Schwarz, that name on the cover? She’s your sister, isn’t she? I wonder what she’s doing now.’

  I didn’t know whether he said that to upset me or whether he really wondered about my family. I wanted to yell at him. I strained my voice muscles, but nothing came out. Just a hoarse, rasping sound.

  ‘So you do listen and think. I thought your brains had taken off with your voice.’

  How I hated him when he said this, and I could do nothing but stamp my foot.

  Once he awoke in the morning and couldn’t see me. He opened his wardrobe door to get out his clothing and found me curled up there with my head resting on the world’s longest scarf.

  ‘Wake up, Rachel, and get out of my wardrobe.’

  Had I sleepwalked there in the middle of the night? I didn’t know. I couldn’t remember deciding to curl up in Friedrich’s wardrobe. I certainly didn’t like the smell in there. There was nothing familiar about it. Nevertheless, at least twice a week he’d find me there in the morning sleeping soundly.

  Friedrich went to his Hitler Youth meetings after school during the week. He dressed in his black trousers and brown shirt, grey socks and shoes and wore a small brown cap on his head.

  ‘We shall be as tough as leather, as hard as Krupp steel,’ he chanted to his grandparents before he left the apartment.

  ‘Stop that carry-on,’ said Gertrude. ‘I hate you belonging to the Hitler Youth. I hate the nonsense and the slogans they teach you. It’s a load of rubbish. If the authorities didn’t make such a fuss about it, believe me, I’d keep you home.’

  ‘I love it. I learn gymnastics and basketball. I march. Remember when I went on a two-day cross-country hike? It’s to make me strong, because I am special. I am an Aryan. I am part of the master race. I learn all about the war and our beloved Führer.’ Friedrich stared hard at me as he said this. I met his stare evenly and eventually he looked away.

  He grumbled to his grandfather:‘It’s awful. I wake up in the morning and Rachel crawls out from under my bed or from inside the wardrobe. Can you imagine, Opa? I open the wardrobe and she’s inside with that silly scarf. And she’s eating our food. That means we all get less.’

  Heinrich told Friedrich, ‘Stop complaining. Germans are eating very well compared to other countries. Hitler is nervous to leave German civilians starving. Our food is coming from Polish and French mouths right now and being sent here to Germany for us to eat. They are starving. The same goes for other European countries. Leave Rachel alone.’

  Then, because Friedrich looked unbearably miserable, Heinrich put his hand on his grandson’s shoulder. ‘These are hard times, Freddy. We all have to make sacrifices. One day life will go back to normal.’

  His grandfather’s eyes moved slowly over me. I thought then about the danger I’d placed them in. I’d been living with them for months now and the grief I felt about separation from my parents and Miri had been so intense, I hadn’t thought much at all about this new family. I was eating their food. They ate less as a result. They had to keep me hidden. If they were discovered hiding a Jew, they’d also be taken away.

  I wanted to feel grateful to Gertrude at least, this pale elderly woman who sometimes fussed over me. She took down the hem of my dresses as I grew, though I didn’t grow much sideways. I was a skinny child, with long wavy hair parted in the centre and pinned back from my forehead. I began wearing Friedrich’s old shoes as my feet had grown, and I also wore his old socks.

  Friedrich growled the first time he saw me with his shoes on my feet. ‘Nobody asked me if Rachel could wear my old shoes.’

  Heinrich ruffled Friedrich’s hair and sighed.

  One day I watched Heinrich unclog the drain under the sink. ‘I used to be a handyman,’ he told me as I sat watching him fiddle with pliers and some wire, ‘when I was younger and working. Tough work, and I’m an old man now, but I still remember a bit of plumbing. It’s good that I can still do repairs. All the young men are away at war.’

  Once I sat by the window to watch the birds on the ledge. I remembered Miri’s poem: Birds are lucky / They can fly away / Unless someone shoots them down.

  Heinrich pulled me away from the window roughly, but his voice was soft. ‘Don’t do that, Rachel. You put us all in danger. As far as everyone outside this room knows, you don’t exist.’

  That’s true, I thought. I am invisible. I only exist inside this apartment. To everyone else I am a ghost, a phantom from another life.

  In the beginning when Friedrich went to school, I took his books from the bookshelf in his room and read. I wasn’t a strong reader anymore and as Friedrich was two years older than me, his books were more complicated than the ones I’d been used to. I struggled through everything except old books with smaller words. At other times I sat on the couch with Heinrich and Gertrude as they listened to the wireless.

  ‘All we hear is propaganda, news of conquests and, if we are lucky, a little music. It’s all rubbish,’ mumbled Gertrude. ‘What’s the point in listening?’

  ‘What are you doing?’ Heinrich asked Gertrude as she reached over and turned the dial.

  ‘I am trying to get the BBC, the English broadcast. It’s in German too. I want to know what is really happening.’

  ‘Gertrude, you are mad. They are jamming those stations, and will track you down. They will send us all away. You know the penalty for listening to foreign broadcasting stations.’

  Heinrich moved the dial back to the voice of Germany; a high-pitched voice ranted about war conquests. Then came marching songs and the German national anthem. This was followed by sweet violin music. My eyes stung with tears as I wondered where Erich was.

  ‘In between all the talking and the marching and the propaganda, we get some music—Bach, Beethoven, Wagner, something that reminds us of another time. We have to be satisfied with that.’ Heinrich tapped his fingers on the arm of the sofa in time to the music.

  ‘I STILL CAN’T believe that we are sheltering a Jew,’ Friedrich complained yet again to Gertrude before he left the building one morning. ‘I go to school and everyone talks about how the Jews are responsible for the war, and we are caring for one. It’s not right, Oma, and it’s making me very nervous.’

  ‘If I have told you once I’ve told you a hundred times, you are listening to nonsense. Jews lived peacefully among us before all this rubbish. They were all good Germans, too. Many fought for Germany in the First World War and were given medals for bravery.’

  ‘Well, there has to be something bad about them, otherwise we wouldn’t hate them,’ Friedrich answered.

  ‘It’s that Hitler Youth group you belong to. It has you fired up. You have to learn to think for yourself, Friedrich.’

  Off he went to school. I watched him from the corner of the window in our bedroom. He’d found a stray stone on the road and was kicking it in front of him. I wondered if he’d kick it all the way to school. He was free in a way I couldn’t be. No yellow star to set him
apart. He could run and jump and play.

  I saw a boy grab him by his collar, and Friedrich stopped his kicking and they began to laugh and talk. What did they talk about? How the war was going? The bombings? What did ordinary German children talk about?

  Sometimes air-raid sirens howled through Leipzig like the baying of wolves, for Germany was now being bombed. Heinrich would grab Friedrich and run downstairs to the cellar along with everyone else in the building. Of course I couldn’t go, and Gertrude refused to leave me. Heinrich protested.

  ‘Don’t you know the risk you take?’ he asked her. ‘You can get killed if a bomb hits the building.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Gertrude. ‘But I can’t leave the child here alone. She needs me.’

  Her face creased into folds as she smiled at me, while the sirens were screeching.

  Once, while lying under her and Heinrich’s bed and waiting for the sirens to stop, Gertrude said to me, ‘I will tell you about my daughter. The one who died. She was always sick as a child. There was nothing anyone could do about it, the doctor said. Her heart just gave out. She was a lovely girl.’

  As the bombs whistled, she held me to her and said, ‘I couldn’t help my daughter, but I can help you.’

  We waited for the whistling to stop and the bombs to find their targets. Sometimes Gertrude pressed her body on top of me to keep me safe, and although she didn’t smell like my mama her warmth comforted me. In the darkness there, I thought, Mama, Mama, where are you? I want you to know that wherever you are, I am safe. This lady, Gertrude, is taking care of me. I remind her of her dead daughter. She is very kind. Her husband, Heinrich, is grumpy but he has a good heart. Their grandson doesn’t like me. I am getting enough food to eat, more than what we used to have, but I’m still skinny. Soon the war will be over. The good soldiers from far away will come. Almost every night now searchlights stretch across the sky like swords and sirens screech as bombs drop. Hitler must lose this war. I heard Heinrich say that boys not much older than Friedrich are being enlisted in the war.

  Friedrich continued to tell me that Hitler was a great man. He also told me that he hated me more than he hated the war. He didn’t say this with a lot of feeling, though. It seemed more like he felt he shouldn’t, as a good German, get through the day without insulting me.

  And I hate you too, I thought, though not as much as I hate the war.

  His school was often closed now, but one day he went and came home just a few hours later. He put his schoolbag in his bedroom and glanced at me, then at his grandmother. His eyes were bloodshot.

  Gertrude ran to him. ‘Freddy, what happened?’

  ‘They came today. The Gestapo. I never knew. My best friend, Frank. I meet him at the end of the street and we walk to school together. You remember how he used to come over here before she came. I used to go to his house, too. I never realised.’

  ‘What happened? You are as white as a ghost.’

  ‘Oma, the Gestapo came and took him away. His father was Jewish. He had been pretending to be one of us and no-one knew. He used to hand in the best compositions in class about why the Jews were destroying the world. Frank is gone. His family too. He was lying all along. I ate dinner there, and they were Jews.’

  His grandmother sighed. ‘Freddy, tell me, now that you know Frank was half Jewish, do you hate him? Did he harm you? Were his parents unkind to you? How come you didn’t notice that his father was Jewish? You said once that it was easy to pick Jews out.’

  She cupped his chin with her hand. ‘Freddy, there was nothing wrong with Frank before you knew. He is still the same Frank who came to our house. I met his father. He was a good man. Freddy, you need to think about what is going on in Germany. There is talk in the street about Jews being taken away and…’

  Gertrude stopped. I was sitting on the sofa listening intently. She looked at me then back at Freddy. He pulled away and went to his bedroom slamming the door behind him.

  Gertrude wiped her hands on her apron and bit her lower lip. ‘Of course, after the war, you will find your family again, Rachel.’

  Yes, that was what would happen.

  I opened the door to our bedroom. Freddy was lying on the bed, facing the curtains covering the window.

  He turned as I came in. ‘I will never go outside again. My best friend was Jewish. His father was and that is the same thing, according to Hitler. You only need one Jewish grandparent to be a non-Aryan. What’s more, he was accused of being involved in un-German activities, so he was a traitor too. What’s going to happen to Frank? I don’t care. He deceived me.’ Then he began to cry. He punched his pillow. ‘I hate the war.’

  I felt sorry for him. It was the first time, since living with Gertrude and Heinrich, that I’d felt anything other than dislike for Friedrich. I watched as he thrust his fists into his pillow, refusing to admit that he would miss his friend.

  Chapter Twelve

  I WAS NOW over ten years old. My birthday, in April, had come and gone. So had Pesach, the eating of matzo, the celebration of escape from slavery, and the hunting by the youngest in the family for the hidden matzo.

  I remembered when ribbons were special to me. Long ago. How I used to study myself in the mirror. How Papa said my smile could light up the world. I remembered the long table and the throwing of bread on Friday nights. I remembered the warmth of Mama, Papa’s thick eyebrows that needed trimming, Miri sitting at the table writing in her journal. My cousins, my aunt and uncle…I missed them all. Agnes, if only I could see you, I thought, I would let you have tantrums the whole time.

  I decided to read Miri’s journal. It had been too painful to open the book, but now I decided I had to be braver. I’d been sleeping with it under my cushions at night, and whenever Friedrich tried to grab the journal to have a look, I held it firmly away from him.

  I read the words slowly, making out every third word or so and pieced it together in my mind. My sweet sister’s journal. I smelt the pages. How I wished for some scent, some reminder of Miri to linger, but too much time had gone by and the smell, like my sister, had disappeared.

  Sometimes, when Friedrich found me in the wardrobe he complained, but at other times his eyes would open wide as if he was suddenly truly seeing me, Rachel, and he’d close the wardrobe door softly.

  Mostly, he became more agitated. He stayed home more than he wanted to. His grandparents insisted: ‘It’s not safe anywhere.’ Heinrich said, ‘At the shops where we get our rations there’s talk of things going badly at the Front. There are many casualties. The American troops are bombing Europe, and Hitler is still trying to win the war with Russia. Nobody will admit it, but we are losing this war.’

  Friedrich didn’t say much to this. He folded his arms and went to his bedroom. ‘Why don’t you talk?’ he asked me later.

  I shrugged. I don’t know.

  I felt ready to talk. I wanted to talk. I felt closed in on myself. Yes, I had the words. They lingered in my throat, they wouldn’t come out. In the beginning, when Gertrude had first taken me in, it didn’t seem to matter. I had nothing to say. I lived inside myself, in a silent world of grief and despair. Now, I wanted more. I wanted to talk to my rescuers. I even wanted to talk to Friedrich. Would I ever talk again?

  His school was closed most of the time now, due to air-raids or the fear of them, and Friedrich was becoming bored and fidgety but curious too. ‘Who are you?’ he asked one day when his grandparents were out. He paced the floor. ‘I can’t stand this, I need someone to play with. Even you are better than no-one. However, whatever game we play, I must be in charge. You are Jewish, after all.’

  I felt great anger when he said this. I stamped my foot on the floor. Friedrich laughed.

  ‘I shall be your teacher,’ he decided.

  As the months passed he taught me maths and how to read more difficult books. He used his blackboard and a piece of chalk when teaching maths. He liked being a teacher, instructing me, showing off.

  I went along with it becau
se I wanted to read Miri’s poetry properly and not have to try to guess the words. So I listened and watched but I still thought Friedrich was a nasty boy with a fat head.

  Not being able to read out loud was a problem, but I silently wrote down sentences he dictated in his annoying voice and solved maths problems. Reluctantly, he began to praise me. ‘For a Jew, you are intelligent.’

  I am intelligent. I am also Jewish, I told him from my silent world.

  I wrote in my exercise book:‘Was your school friend, Frank, smart?’

  Friedrich looked straight ahead after he read it. I watched his lips quiver. ‘What is that journal you hide from me?’

  I pointed again to my written question. Friedrich bent down to pull up his sagging socks, then said quietly, ‘Yes, he was very smart. Now let me see the journal.’

  So I showed him Miri’s journal. He thumbed through the pages, sometimes stopping, as if he was thinking about Miri’s words.

  When he’d finished reading, Friedrich became quiet. ‘It’s good,’ he said eventually, closing Miri’s journal. ‘Your sister is smart too.’

  I smiled at Friedrich, even though he wasn’t looking at me.

  Later, I smudged Miri’s pencil writing with my fingers. Not the writing, but places where she’d crossed out a line or changed her words. I rubbed the pencil marks on my fingers together, hoping some trace of Miri would dissolve into my skin and become part of me.

  Miri’s last journal entry:

  Reflection

  God.

  We are your chosen people

  So it is said.

  Why are we then cursed

  To wander

  Through wasteland

  Always searching

  For a home?

  Why don’t you part the

  Red Sea yet again

  And give us refuge

  And drown the Nazis