Of Another Time and Place

by Brad Schaeffer

  He looked to me with the pain of a man watching his loved one slowly dying in his arms and powerless to intervene.

  “Harmon,” he pleaded. “Can you not see that Hitler is like a slipshod surgeon mutilating the body of a people who gave the world Beethoven, Bach, Handel, Mendelssohn, Brahms, and so many others? I refuse to accept that the same people who produced Ode to Joy can also produce the Nazis. I refuse! You want to know why Leopold Krupinski does not flee? Because he still believes in the old Germany.”

  “Then he’s a fool,” I shot back at him. I looked him square in the eye and repeated: “I’m sorry but you’re a fool, Leo. There’s only the New Germany now. And you’re not a part of it. That’s the reality you have to face.”

  I rose from the piano bench just as Constanze came in to join us. Her disappointment was palpable when she realized I would stay no longer.

  Krup remained pinned deep in his chair, staring at an invisible spot on the wall. I wonder if at that moment he even recognized me. But I was who I was. I understood then that I was Cadet Harmon Becker of the German Luftwaffe. I had to close the door on this part of my life, step in line with my Wehrmacht comrades, and follow the Führer, although I knew not where we were going.

  “Thank you for your tutelage.” I extended my hand to him. But he refused to say another word. My outstretched limb hung in the air until I slowly returned it to my hip. “You should leave this place while you still can.” I turned to Constanze, who stood perplexed by what she’d just witnessed. “I’ll show myself out.”

  I straightened up, retrieved my hat from the top of the piano, and marched from the study, through the front hall, and out the door into the bright sunshine. I could feel Krup’s eyes boring through my back as I left. But he remained silent. I patted little Elsa once more on her curly black locks as she combed her dolly’s hair, and strode down the pathway to the roadside. Jakob leaned against the car and observed my passing while wiping off a greasy carburetor with a filthy rag. His bright hazel eyes, accented more so by the oily grime that darkened his young face, followed me to the end of the property. He carried himself in a way that made him seem far older than his twelve years.

  “You’re not nice anymore,” he called to me. And then he went back to the comfort of his tinkering.

  As I began walking down the dirt road, retracing my steps back to town, something struck me as odd. The master’s window was open, but there was no more music. A mournful silence had descended upon his house. And I wondered if it would eventually spread to cover the whole of my nation that Krupinski still so forlornly believed in…even if it had renounced him a long time ago.

  That same man was now sitting warily beside me on a piano bench. He was, in fact, quaking with fear. He knew he was staking the lives of his entire family on that goodness he suspected still resided under my gray uniform and swastika. What to do? This was treason with a capital T. The camps were filled with gentiles who’d been caught harboring Jews and mercilessly tortured to reveal all their secrets. My mind raced. But then I gazed up at Amelia, and it was as if a dam holding back all my sense of decency and Christian charity I’d bottled up since taking the Führereid first cracked and then burst to drench my heart with a sense of humanity I’d forsaken in the moral rot of war.

  I took a hesitant step forward and then, shaking any residual clouds of doubt from my head, I put my hand on Krup’s as it trembled on the keys, his fit of tears spent. He turned, and in the dim light of the cloistered parlor I saw a face I’d come to love over the years…and I nodded reassuringly. He smiled wanly up at me, and then in a voice that cracked from the unbearable strain of the moment, he simply said: “Thank you, my boy.”

  27

  When his nerves finally allowed, Krup hoisted himself uneasily off the bench and gave me a weak hug. I could feel his bones through the sweater that draped over him like a canvas sack. Holes were beginning to open through the elbows. It was evident by his stale odor that he wore the same clothes day after day. It was also plain enough that his health was failing.

  “Come see the family,” he begged in a feeble, rasping voice.

  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” I cautioned him, though I aimed my comments at Amelia. As the emotion of the moment began to fade, the dangerous reality of my situation began to sink in. Suddenly I saw SS men everywhere…on the streets, atop the roof, behind the draperies, under Hanna’s bed.

  Amelia, too, was fearful. “Leo, you must go back upstairs. I took a terrible chance with this already.”

  He grudgingly nodded, and turned towards the stairs, beckoning me to go with him. I paused and then followed him. At the foot of the steps he stared up as a man would returning to his prison cell after a brief parole. And then he weakly ascended to the top with the difficulty of an oxygen-starved mountain climber, grabbing on to the banister like a life rope. He had to pause once, after only a few risers, to hack and wheeze, and then he managed to make it to the top.

  Amelia remained downstairs while I nervously followed Krup up the creaking staircase. Once on the second floor, he led me to the end of the corridor, where a ladder hung from a small trap door. I knew of this garret from my times with Amelia before the war, and I remembered the space to be cold, dank, and dark, suitable only for storage. That a family of four could be living up there gave me pause. But I could hear whispers coming from the ceiling above me.

  The old man mounted the ladder and with considerable effort struggled up into the hatch. I stood beneath him craning my neck to stare up at the little opening in the ceiling. “Come up,” he whispered. I looked around pensively and then hauled myself, uniform and all, up into the darkness that had been the home of Leopold Krupinski and his family for two long, unimaginably cruel years.

  I could hear Frau Krupinski’s agitated voice. “What are you doing, Leopold? Who is coming?”

  “It’s alright, my dear,” he said in a soothing tone. “He’s an old friend.”

  I poked my head above the floor level and surveyed the attic, which had been converted into a cramped makeshift flat. The narrow windows on each end had blankets hanging over them to prevent anyone from seeing inside. A little table covered in books and orbited by rickety chairs was set up. Arranged in neat stacks against the exposed studs were rusting pots and some non-perishable supplies, like canned peaches, jerked beef, and a bucket of water. Off to the side were several quilts laid out on the bare floorboards. This is where they slept. A lone dresser sat up against one wall with a wash basin and towel. Another bucket sat in the far corner. Even with the windows blocked, there was still sufficient light for reading.

  I twisted around to see Constanze standing behind her husband in a guarded fashion. Like him, she was haggard and had aged considerably since the time I’d last seen her. She had many more gray hairs than before, and they fell in front of her face in frizzy strands.

  At first she recoiled from the sight of my uniform as I rose up through the trap door entrance. But she very quickly recognized me. “Harmon!” she gasped. When I hoisted myself to stand before her, she went around her husband and embraced me. “I’m so happy you’re still alive,” she said. I held her emaciated body in my arms. As she’d been a portly woman most of her life, her weight loss was especially unsettling. “I’m sorry I have no tea to offer you this time.”

  Then two smaller forms appeared from shadows in the corner of the garret, one shorter than the other. Jakob and little Elsa, still carrying her ragged doll, stood silent. They were trying to make sense of the bizarre scene of their mother embracing a man who wore the uniform of the people who wanted them dead. Though two years older than when they first went into hiding, Elsa was still unable to fully grasp what was happening, and to her it must have seemed all a great game. But I could see Jakob’s look had only grown more acutely hostile since he insulted me from behind the hood of his Ford a lifetime ago.

  And there I stood beholding the hud
dled and hunted Krupinski family, now reduced to hiding in an attic to survive. “Oh Leo,” I said. “That you should have to live like this.”

  Jakob sneered: “This is not living.” Of the four he was in the best health. Spry and with a mind like a razor, he was a teenager now. He’d grown almost a foot while he stewed in his prison, wondering if he would ever see his way into manhood.

  I made a conciliatory move towards him. “Jakob.”

  “You go to hell!” he spat. Then to Krup: “Papa, you must be insane, bringing him here—”

  “That’s enough, Jake!” said his mother. “This is Harmon Becker.”

  But the boy was adamant. “I don’t care if he’s Elijah in the flesh. He’s wearing a Luftwaffe uniform! When he leaves here he’ll go straight to the SS!”

  I was hurt by this, but I couldn’t blame the boy. His father stepped between us. “Finish your studies, Jake.” He looked down at Elsa and smiled. “You too, little one,” he said as he patted her head. There was a wire strung across the length of the garret, bisecting the room. The trap door was located in the middle. Constanze took them both and led them to the table. Then she draped a bed sheet over the wire and thus were two rooms made in a fashion, each private from the other. Krup and I at least had the illusion of being alone together.

  While Amelia paced downstairs, the old man led me to the far corner of the attic. I had to stoop at points so my head wouldn’t hit the ceiling joists.

  He peeked from behind a blanket at the gathering dusk. “Ah,” he finally said. “It grows dark. We cannot light any lamps. We’ve hidden in the shadows for two years.”

  I felt a swell of emotion rise in me. “Oh Krup,” I said. “What can I say?”

  He turned to face me. “There is nothing to say. This is the new world.” Then he considered my uniform. “And you seem to fit well in it. You are the big German hero now?” He motioned around him. “Well, behold. This is what you fly for. What you kill for.”

  I shook my head. “I joined the Luftwaffe to defend my country. You know that. Not to fight for this.”

  “But you do nonetheless.” A knowing look passed over him. “I can read your thoughts, eh? You consider yourself above all this? This is the work of the Nazis, yes? You are just a soldier. An officer and a gentleman?”

  I nodded grimly.

  “My country, right or wrong?” he pressed.

  I grew annoyed. “The Allies bomb us. I try to stop them. What more is there to understand?”

  Krup shook his head in exasperation. “That is the mind of the soldier. But the mind of the rational man asks, why do they come in the first place?”

  I had no answer. Then he peered into my eyes. I could see he was on the verge of breaking down in sobs again.

  “Look at me,” he demanded. “I have lost everything! Can you imagine what that is like? To see streets you walked, or cafés you visited…a certain corner that once housed your music shop. A meadow just beyond town that once embraced your home. To have done no harm to the world but try to give the beauty of music—a gift I gave you—and still only be allowed to dream of the treasures you once knew from an attic window? And why? Because I am a Jew? What does that matter? I am as German as you or that dog Keitel. But I must hide. And yet my family and I are the lucky ones. You know what is happening, of course? All across Europe, I fear?”

  I stared at a dark smudge on the far wall. “I don’t read the papers,” I said weakly.

  “Stop it, Harmon! You are too intelligent to let your station blind you to the truth. A truth that I can see from way up here, isolated as I am. The darkness has descended. It’s all around us, penetrating to the very core. It is like a wet fog, sticking to the pale skin of all Germans who plead ignorance to the slaughter!

  “All of the Jews are dead,” he continued. “If I step one foot out of this house I am dead. And I tell you there will come a time when this black shroud lifts and the light of justice shines again. And then all the good little Nazis will scatter from the light like roaches. They will disappear and rearrange their banal masks into those of grief, despair, and, of course, shock. You will not find a Nazi among them. But none will be without guilt. Because this is exactly what the Third Reich promised. There was no subterfuge. Hitler spoke and delivered, and the people rejoiced. Harmon, don’t you see? You have never harmed a Jew in your life. Think hard. Be true to who you are.”

  I was growing more uncomfortable by the second.

  “What do you mean, who I am?”

  He closed his eyes in frustration at my pigheadedness and between wheezes and coughs loosed his anger upon me.

  “Imagine putting a bullet through my brain, thrusting a bayonet through my wife’s belly, smashing my children’s skulls. So long as you fly under the swastika, you fly for that.” He let that rest with me. Then he concluded with: “You think you are brave? The courage that Amelia has shown in hiding us is far more profound than any your uniform implies. What you do next will show just how brave you really are.”

  I stood silent, trying not to look too hard into him. Though I towered over him by a full foot, I felt small in his presence.

  “Krup,” I finally said. “I promise you I will tell no one of what I’ve seen here.”

  At that he grew less coiled and managed to even let a slit of a smile crack through his leathery face. I’d just vowed to commit treason on his behalf, as failure to report Jews to the authorities was a crime. But he also knew that, as an officer, my sense of duty was strong—ingrained in me through years of indoctrination in a blend of ancient Teutonic military code and modern National Socialist zeal. And so he cautioned me: “I hope you’re true to your word. But only time will tell.”

  It was growing dark, and I was anxious to leave. Leo ushered me to the trap door opening. “Now you must go,” he said. “Fear is the lifeblood of us all these days. You take care of yourself, my boy.”

  I patted him on the shoulder and climbed down the ladder. He was about to close the trap door above me when he offered me some advice: “I believe you are a good man, Harmon. What you choose to do with that goodness is entirely up to you.”

  Then he folded up the ladder and retracted it with the door until it was flush with the ceiling.

  I stood weak-kneed in the dark hallway and tried to make sense of all I’d seen. The only sound I could hear was the hammering of my own heart. I would like to say it was thumping so hard from a sense of renewed love for my old master, or an awakening of conscience deep within me. But it was much simpler than that. I was scared out of my wits.

  28

  “You foolish girl!” I said to Amelia in a severe yet hushed tone so as not to wake Hanna, who was sleeping in the next room. “Are you trying to get yourself hanged?”

  “Calm down, Harmon.”

  “I will not calm down.” I paced back and forth, wiping the sweat from my palms on my new uniform trousers while she stood with her hands defiantly on her hips. “Do you know what you’ve done? You have to get them out of here.”

  “Get them out of here?” she shot back. “To where?”

  “Will no church take them?”

  “The priests must live here too,” she replied. “The ones who did try to help in the beginning were taken away. You don’t know what it’s been like. Keitel’s people are all around. Everyone watches everyone. Neighbors spy on neighbors. Children turn in their parents. You don’t know who will report who.”

  I stopped pacing and exhaled, glancing up at the wooden beams in the living room ceiling. “Well, I know what Keitel is like,” I said with foreboding. “He’ll eventually become wise to this.”

  “What would you have me do? Throw them out on the street?”

  She came up close to me and took my hands. “If you love me,” she declared, “then you must embrace that I cannot accept things as they are. I have to help them.”

  I ran my ch
eek against hers. Her skin was so soft, like a newborn babe’s. It belied her grit. “You can help no one by dangling from Keitel’s rope,” I whispered.

  “Nor can I help them by doing nothing.” Then she dropped the bomb. “But you can.”

  I took a step back. “What do you mean?”

  “You can get them out of here.” I giggled nervously. But she remained adamant. “I’m serious, Harmon.”

  “You’re crazy.” I laughed. When I saw her eyes narrow and her jaw clench, my laughter faded. “Me?” I challenged her. “How?”

  “You can fly them out.” She said that in so matter-of-fact a way, I thought for a moment she had no clue as to what she was asking of me. “You’re a pilot. Isn’t that what that uniform is all about?”

  My God, she was serious! Too stunned to even reply at first, I turned my back on her, my frustration growing. I stepped to the window that faced the street and the land of the Nazis beyond. If only those in the Himmelplatz knew what we were talking about in here. Finally I turned to her. “You really are insane. You want me to commit treason. To betray my own people for—”

  “These are your people!”

  I ran my fingers through my hair. “The Führer thinks otherwise,” I reminded her. “They’re Jews. By not reporting you I’m already committing a serious crime.”

  “Such a brave man,” she said sarcastically.

  Terrified anger popped in me. I advanced and grabbed her rather sternly by the shoulders. “No. A stupid man! As it stands now I could lose everything.”

  She looked down to my clenched hands but remained unfazed. “They have lost everything.”

  “That’s not my fault.”

  My grip softened as I saw her brave facade start to crumble. Her nose grew red and her eyes welled with tears. “It is your fault. It’s my fault. It’s all our faults.”