The next year my mother met Kurt. Kurt Jonas, she told me. His family owned a clothing store in Bonn. And despite the depression that hit Germany hard, Kurt’s family stayed in business.
“Another boyfriend? Did you love him, Mom? Like you loved Otto?”
“Yes.” My mother sighed. “It was different. But yes, I loved him very much. And my father was so happy when Kurt asked me to marry him. A Jewish boy from a good family—educated, successful.” She stopped for a moment to catch her breath. “In those days, we had to believe our lives in Germany would get better, even though most of us knew things were getting worse. And what could be better than getting married?”
I faked surprise at her having been married to someone other than my father. But it didn’t matter. My mother didn’t see my reaction as she talked about Kurt. And I couldn’t say that I already knew. I couldn’t tell her Robin had shared her secrets. I couldn’t admit I had broken into her metal box. I didn’t think I was ready to talk about Charlie.
My mother and Kurt had a good marriage, she said, though things in Germany did get worse, much worse. Her father urged them to leave the country. He wanted the whole family to go. But his wife wouldn’t hear of it. “This is our home,” the stepmother said. “We’re all Germans, after all. This Hitler business will end soon.”
My mother took a shallow breath. Then very slowly: “Amy, there’s something else. Something you should know.”
I curled my fingers around the edge of my seat, squeezed the dark green velveteen fabric. I knew what she was about to tell me. I leaned forward to catch every word.
“Kurt and I had a baby. Anna.” Tears filled her whispered words. “I’m sorry I never told you. But I… I couldn’t talk about her.” I pulled closer and took my mother’s hand again.
Anna was only two, she said, when Kurt tried to get documents for the three of them to go to France. My mother’s brother Walter was already in Paris. He rented a room there from an artist who needed income more than studio space. If my mother could get to Paris, she figured, she’d be able to stay with Walter for a little while, just long enough to find a job and an apartment. Her command of French, along with a bribe, would get her working papers. But there would be no working papers for Kurt, my mother told me. Not for a German Jewish businessman who didn’t speak French. Yet for my mother, there was a chance of a job and temporary lodging. Her brother’s landlady might let her in, she believed, if unencumbered by a husband and child.
Kurt pleaded for the three of them to go together.
“But think about Anna,” my mother said. “At least here she still has a place to sleep. Where would the three of us go in France without jobs, without a place to stay? If I go alone to Paris, Walter will be able to help me.”
My mother was scared to go by herself. Terrified, she told me. And leaving Anna was the hardest thing she ever did. But it was Anna she was thinking of when she begged Kurt to let her go first. “Anna’s just a baby. She needs food and a bed. A hungry, crying child will only bring attention. But if I go ahead, I can find us a safe place to live. And then you’ll bring Anna.”
It was Otto who got my mother out. Otto—a good man, she said. He hadn’t forgotten her, even after she married Kurt.
Otto had friends in the government, acquaintances at the embassies. He had always been popular, my mother reminded me. Otto would get the papers for her and for Kurt and Anna. Yet though he could do that, he couldn’t control the cost. His friends in high places worked slowly. It took money—lots of money—to grease the wheels.
By the fall of 1938, Kurt’s family sold what they could. Then Otto went to work. Though all Jewish passports had been annulled, emigration permits were available—expedited for a price, of course. And the quota for entry to France could be manipulated if you knew the right people, the people Otto knew.
He got documents for my mother and for Kurt and Anna. “Please,” Kurt tried again. “We must go together.”
“But we haven’t much more money, and no place for all of us in Paris,” my mother reminded him. “I have to go first. I have to find a safe place for Anna. And then you’ll come. Just a week or two. That’s all I need.”
November 8, 1938. My mother kissed her husband and her little girl, then blazed the trail she believed they would follow.
“And what happened to Anna?” I asked. I didn’t want to hear, but I needed to know.
“The next night, the storm troopers came. Kristallnacht. Night of Broken Glass.”
It took time for my mother to find out what happened that night, but eventually she did. She heard and she imagined. And she never forgave herself for having left without her child.
Kurt would have carried Anna to the back room when the commotion started, my mother thought. He might have wrapped her in blankets and laid her down gently, her doll in hand.
Perhaps Anna was sleeping when the storm troopers arrived. Kurt might have met them at the door. He would have told them his wife and daughter were away. “There’s no one else here,” Kurt probably said as they pulled him outside and sent the search party in.
But then Anna cried out, my mother believed. The way she pictured it, a Nazi yelled “Who is this?” as he dragged Anna onto the street. “Your daughter? The one who’s gone? Nicht hier?”
While the storm troopers murdered Kurt, my mother imagined, members of the Hitler Youth kicked Anna like a soccer ball. My mother hoped Kurt had died first. She hoped he wasn’t forced to watch their little girl suffer.
This story hit me hard. I cried for Kurt. I cried for Anna. Mostly, though, I cried for my mother.
“That’s what I see when I close my eyes,” she said. “Boys kicking Anna like a ball. I never should have left her. We all would have gotten out if I had listened to Kurt. We could have left together, and somehow we would have managed.”
“You did what you thought you had to, Mom.” I brushed away tears—hers and my own. “You tried to do the right thing to make her life better.”
We stayed quiet for a while. Then my mother said, “I’m sorry, Amy. I should have told you. But people don’t always do the right thing, even when they think they are. And somehow we just have to forgive them, forgive ourselves.”
I tried to swallow, but sorrow and guilt filled my throat. It was time to tell her about the metal box. It was time to tell her that I, not she, had killed Charlie. My mother had suffered so much, so long. I couldn’t let her carry the blame for Charlie’s death too.
“But it all worked out all right,” she went on before I found my words. “All right. All right. All right.” My mother’s lips trembled. Then a tiny smile. “I came here and met your father. And he was good to me. And I had you… and Charlie.”
“Mom, there’s something I have to tell you. The metal box…”
“I know.” Her eyes closed. She needed to sleep, or wanted to sleep. Maybe in her dreams my mother saw Anna the way I saw Charlie in mine.
“But I have to tell you, Mom. About Charlie. About the accident.”
“I know, Amy,” she whispered. “I know what happened that day. We don’t have to talk about it.”
I exhaled as if I’d been holding my breath for a very long time. So my mother knew the truth after all. I must have left clues: shoes out of order, papers out of place. My mother knew I had breached her privacy. And she knew the price I had already paid.