“I am glad we had this meal together. We might never see each other again, you know,” she said.
As soon as Abel came home that evening, I asked him what he thought of the young secretary’s pessimistic words.
“Oh, yes, yes, I know, I too heard some saber rattling,” Abel said. “Don’t worry, the ogre has to digest Austria and Czechoslovakia first, and that will take time.”
XI
I rarely ventured out alone into the foreign world that Germany still was for me. Abel, who was working sixteen hours a day in order to escape this very world, had no time—and no desire—to take me out.
We visited his kind old mother. When younger brother, cocky in his uniform, would show up, we would leave abruptly and feel bad about it.
The friend who had persuaded Abel to return to Germany was now passing on to him the freelance jobs he did not want. We had to be grateful. Not easy. I disliked the man’s wife as much as I disliked him. Moreover, we now knew that he was a party member. Our rare visits were strained.
I looked forward to the spartan vegetarian dinners at Christine’s house. Christine was friendly and protective. She smiled at my French weaknesses, my pretty, unpractical dresses and shoes. And my waist. My liver had no room, she said. She had often massaged me to correct the defect when I was her patient.
One August evening at Christine’s dinner table, I related that I had seen, pinned up on the wall of my dentist’s office, newspaper clippings representing gruesome photographs of old German men and women who had been tortured by the cruel Poles.
“I bet these are the same newspaper clippings that were shown before we felt obligated to invade Czechoslovakia,” Christine exclaimed.
The maid, we all knew, was listening.
Christine did not care; she loudly predicted future calamities.
The next morning, newspapers and a blaring radio in the center of town announced that the Poles had attacked a German radio station across the German-Polish border. The following day, the first of September, at 4:30 A.M., German tanks rolled into Poland.
Two days later, Abel came home in midmorning.
“Call, call the French consul . . . now,” he said with such urgency that I asked no questions.
We had no phone, but the lawyer who lived on the second floor had let us use his phone before. I rushed downstairs. The housekeeper, her eyes red from weeping, opened the door.
“My mother came from Poland,” she said as she let me in.
The telephone rang long and shrill in the empty shell of the French consulate.
I dialed again and again. An icy clamp tightened around my heart. My country had declared war on my husband’s country, as it had said it would if Germany attacked Poland.
XII
Memories of these long-past days are like singed photographs retrieved from the ruins of a house that has burned down. Oddly estranged, they still make me shudder.
Abel and I, sitting on a bench in a darkening park, tears running down our faces. Passersby look down at us. Very un-German indeed, to weep in public. I still remember what I was seeing through my tears: flames devouring all things dear to me, from Chartres’s cathedral to my grandmother’s house with its thatched roof.
I, dwarfed and alone, walking under a hundred giant streamers—blood-red with black swastikas in a white circle—floating down Stuttgart’s tall stone buildings in celebration of a bloody victory over the hapless Poles.
Abel and I, standing under golden autumn trees, plotting how to get hold of younger brother’s gun. We needed a gun to end our own unbearable lives.
And then there was Abel’s white-haired mother saying that things are never as bad as one imagines. She must have known. No, she did not, we said.
Christine, eyes flashing, asking, “What did I tell you?”
Her calm husband, shaking his head, telling us, “The French are too smart to want to die for Poland.”
Maybe that was true. Days passed, and France and England, who had declared war, were not invading Germany as expected. One week passed, and Poland was crushed. One week! Russia lost no time in grabbing a large chunk of the vanquished country.
In the history book I had had in grade school, there was a picture I had not forgotten: Frederick the Great, king of Prussia, Catherine the Great, empress of Russia, and Maria-Theresa, archduchess of Austria, tearing apart a map of Poland.
This had happened in the eighteenth century. Was it Poland’s fate to be torn apart by its neighbors?
We were all awed by the swiftness of the German victory. But of course, Poland was such a backward country. The Poles had attacked the mighty German tanks on horseback, with lances!
On October 6, in a long speech, Hitler made a formal proposal for peace. Most Germans, I think, believed he was sincere. Abel and I, bewildered as we were, hung on to every shred of hope. We knew that the information we were fed was truncated, biased, or false, yet what one hears often enough, one begins to believe.
“Lies, lies, lies,” Christine said. “Some truths even are lies in disguise. French and English people don’t want war, Hitler says. Do people of any country ever want to have their lives disrupted, their homes destroyed, their sons killed? The Germans don’t want war either. Yet, we will get a big war. Hitler has tasted blood . . . he wants more of it.”
We refused to be as pessimistic as Christine. Winter had come. Nothing had happened. Nothing would happen. The world was listening to reason.
XIII
One morning in late November, the lawyer’s housekeeper knocked on my door. She had good news for me, she said. She had been downtown shopping and had heard that one could now send letters to England and France.
“Take your letter to the post office,” she added. “I think you’ll need special stamps.”
All communications with England and France had been cut after the declaration of war and, as far as I knew, were still cut. But I was only too ready to believe any good news. I had been worried about my parents and my friends. They, no doubt, imagined that I was incarcerated, perhaps mistreated.
I rushed home to write a reassuring letter. I was well and free to go wherever I wanted to, I wrote. Everybody was as nice and as helpful as before. I hoped that peace would prevail; nobody I knew in Germany wanted war against France, I wrote.
At the post office, the employee to whom I handed my letter said, besides an emphatic, “Nein!” something I could not understand. He did not understand my bad German either.
A large woman standing by offered help. Towering over me, she explained, in simple German, that I had been misinformed. No, no letter could be sent to France. She felt so sorry for me, she said. She assured me that no German man wanted to fight against any French man. She would like so much to help me, she said, but she did not know how.
We walked side by side for a while. Suddenly she said, “If I were you, I would go to the radio station and just ask permission to read my letter on the radio.”
What a good idea! The helpful woman gave me directions, I thanked her, and I was on my way.
At the radio station, a doorkeeper directed me to a polite, well-groomed young gentleman in civilian clothes who spoke French and was eager to help. Would I leave my letter with him? he asked. Yes, I would. He promised I would hear from him shortly.
That evening, I told Abel about all I had accomplished by myself in just one half day.
If he had any misgivings, he did not say.
One