Helga doesn’t answer and Lilli reluctantly follows her sister back to bed. She has no idea how long she’s been lying there, eyes wide open in the dark, when she hears three sharp raps at the door of the apartment.
Even Helga springs up and, in their long flannel nightgowns, the two girls race down the dark hallway to the parlor. To their surprise, the room is lit up, and Mutti and Papa are fully dressed, just as if they’ve been waiting for callers to arrive.
The “callers”—two of Hitler’s secret-police agents—have already entered the Frankfurters’ parlor. They both wear red armbands boldly advertising the well-known black swastika on a white background—the symbol of the Nazi Party. And they are armed with pistols.
Mutti rushes over to her daughters in an attempt to get them out of the room as quickly as possible. But Papa is right behind her. “No, let them stay!” He wrestles the girls free of Mutti and sits them down on the small brocade sofa against the wall. Helga has begun to sob quietly. Lilli holds her sister’s hand tightly. The entire episode passes swiftly and as in a nightmare. The older officer, who introduces himself as Captain Gerhardt Koeppler, tells Papa that he is under arrest and must come with them. When Mutti asks what Papa has done, no reason is given.
“Bring your papers,” Koeppler barks at Papa “and if you have, a warm coat.”
Mutti gives the pale-skinned Koeppler a pleading glance. “Surely, you need not take him away. He is the father of these children, and one more, the youngest who is only five . . .”
“I have my orders,” the captain replies a bit less harshly. “You can come and ask for him at Gestapo headquarters. They will inform you.”
Meekly, Mutti goes to get Papa’s coat, and also gloves and a woolen muffler and hat. Papa comes to where Lilli and Helga are sitting and he kneels at their feet. His expression is fierce as he tells them, “Don’t worry, my little loved ones. And above all, don’t forget the reason for this terrible injustice. You must fight such hatred all your lives . . .”
Captain Koeppler has approached. He taps Papa on the shoulder, as he and the girls clasp one another in a teary embrace. Lilli knows one thing. She will never forget Papa’s arm gripping her shoulder; she will never forget his lips on her wet cheek.
Lilli wakes up to lemony sunshine slanting through the attic window of the tall house in which she and Mutti and her two sisters have been living for nearly six months, following that savage November night on Heinrichstrasse. The event has now come to be called Kristallnacht, or, in English, “Night of Broken Glass.”
The destruction of Jewish property and the brutal arrests of Jewish men continued for a second night. Finally, on the third day, Mutti made her way to the secret-police quarters of the Gestapo. She walked through streets filled with the rubble of shattered windows, broken bricks and concrete, and smashed furniture. Even pianos had been thrown from the balconies of Jewish homes and apartments.
That day, and for many days afterward, Mutti was unable to learn anything of Papa’s fate. The throng of mothers, wives, and daughters seeking information about their loved ones was so great that the building had been cordoned off. Oddly enough, it was a visit by Captain Koeppler to Heinrichstrasse that explained about Papa, and also gave Mutti and the girls “some good advice.” Even on this sunny May morning, as Lilli gazes down onto the street from the turret-like chamber that she and Helga now occupy, she gets a wintry chill thinking of the Nazi officer’s visit a few weeks after Kristallnacht.
Lilli and Helga were at their lessons at the big round table in the parlor under the supervision of Mutti when the doorbell rang. Mutti rose to answer it with both fear and hope. There could be a squadron of booted police come to search the apartment. On the other hand, there could be a helpful messenger with news of Papa.
Lilli looked up from her algebra studies to see a single uniformed figure emerging from the dim vestibule. Without Mutti saying a word, she and Helga leaped up and left the room. “It was he,” Lilli whispered, as they hastened through the hallway to their bedroom, which they no longer shared with Elspeth. As the youngest member of the endangered family, she had already been taken to live with Oma Bayer in the big house in the aristocratic part of town.
“How could you be so sure?” Helga challenged. “You could not even see his face.”
“I know him already,” Lilli answered mysteriously. And soon after Mutti’s caller had left, she came and confided to the girls that it had indeed been Captain Koeppler.
“How could you even talk to him?” Lilli demanded, “after he came here so . . . so roughly, and took Papa away?” It was then that Mutti gave them the news, trying to sound hopeful about Papa and even grateful to the tall, unsmiling Nazi officer.
At last they knew that after Papa had been taken into custody, he had been sent to a camp for political prisoners, where he would stay until his case had been reviewed. What was Papa’s “case?” He had been accused of belonging to a group of Jews and other disloyal Germans trying to take back their rights as citizens and plotting against the Hitler government.
Helga began to sniff, but Lilli looked proud. “I knew Papa was no coward. He has nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Will Captain Koeppler get him out for us, perhaps?” Helga inquired.
“Perhaps,” Mutti said softly. “Meantime, Papa can write to us.”
“From where?” Lilli demanded. “Where is he? Why can’t your ‘friend’ have him sent home at once?”
“Don’t be silly,” Mutti flared. “The captain is not my ‘friend.’ He is only a classmate from the lower school, many years ago. It was good that he could tell us where Papa was taken. It’s a camp for those who are awaiting trial, or for others having to be punished: Buchenwald.”
The name meant little to the girls or even to Mutti. Later, they would learn that Buchenwald was the second of the many notorious labor and concentration camps to be built in Germany—a place of backbreaking toil, starvation and torture, and, almost always, death.
And what was the “good advice” that Mutti’s former school friend had given her?
Lilli learned that, in the captain’s words, it was to “leave this apartment, which is suspect because of your husband’s activities. You will always be under surveillance here. You can save yourself and even your half-Jewish children by going back to your family home. “Surely,” Captain Koeppler had concluded, “Frau and Herr Bayer, your highly respected parents, would not deny shelter to you and your young ones.”
And so it had happened that Elspeth had gone off first to live with Oma and Opa Bayer, most of the Heinrichstrasse furniture was sold (even the grand, richly-carved bed of Oma and Opa Frankfurter), and Lilli and Helga found themselves attic-dwellers in the Bayer household.
Even before the girls are out of bed, Gerda comes whirling into their “eagle’s nest,” as Lilli has sourly come to call it. The Fuhrer, or Nazi leader, as Adolph Hitler is called, has such a retreat in the form of a chalet on the top of an Alpine peak, where he holds secret conferences.
“Only he’s up there to dominate the world,” Lilli has remarked, “while our attic may as well be a dungeon.”
What Lilli meant was how restricted their lives had become, hers and Helga’s, because of the many anti-Jewish laws that either came into effect or were strengthened following Kristallnacht last November. Jews in Nazi Germany may no longer own radios or typewriters, travel on public transportation, go to the theater or the cinema, to parks or beaches, or to restaurants other than the few cafes still operated by Jews. They must carry ration books stamped with the letter J, limiting the kinds and quantities of food or other goods they may purchase, and can only live only in apartment