Do not let guilt for the blood of the innocent remain among Your people, Israel.
Both wife and husband lie together naked under the covers. Comfortable in their marriage bed, Rachel allows herself to drop her guard enough to feel the heat of their intimacy. That is, the intimacy that she is so desperate to maintain and so tempted to ruin. Without Aaron, without her marriage, what is she? A refugee. A mental case, as they put it in Flatbush. A resident nut of the booby hatch. She needs to be Mrs. Aaron Perlman, even when she resents the need. It’s the shelter she has built for herself against the storms of her own mad guilt. So she loves him. She does. She loves him, she puts up with him, she serves his humble husbandly requirements—answering the telephone, shopping the grocery, making the coffee, washing dishes—when she must. Wifely chores. Yet she is compelled to thwart him in his greatest desire.
She has, once again, taken measures to block his ability to deliver a belly, as is said. She has performed a certain operation with a rubberized insert that will permit him to be satisfied but prevent her from absorbing his deposit. And this time, even with all this argument about who has given whom grandkids, Aaron doesn’t complain. He seems to have grown stoic about her measures. Perhaps because, like her, he’s simply happy to have the connection. The escape. The release. Now he begins snoring dully. But Rachel stares into the darkness of the room above, searching out the ceiling crack, listening to the train cars of the West Side elevated line as they pass.
***
By the end of February 1943, there are very few things Jews are still permitted to do. Starving is one of them, but at least for now, so is eating. If one can call it eating, that is, what they’re forced to consume! Jews are not permitted meat or milk. No white bread, chocolate, tea or coffee, or most anything that would make up a normal Berliner diet. No fish, eggs, or butter, only black bread and gruel and stews made from rotting vegetables are on the menu. Yet even on the diet of scrapings and stale loaves, Rashka is changing physically. Her body maturing from a stick to a shape. She’s growing up. Her eema says so. “Rokhl, you’re growing up,” her mother tells her as if it’s perhaps not a crime but probably an unavoidable liability. Rashka employs the reflecting glass of passing shop windows as mirrors, and these mirrors agree: time is busy transforming her into a young woman passing the glass with the yellow Shield of David sewn to her breast.
They have long ago lost the villa in Wilmersdorf, auctioned off from under their feet after the laws stripped Jews of most of their property rights. Since then, they have been forced to inhabit various ramshackle flats in various ramshackle locations. The villa feels like a distant dream of her childhood. Rashka has learned to live with leaking roofs and drafty windows, polluted plumbing, bedbugs, and the skittering rats from the gutters. But she can see how this daily squalor is paring down her mother. Whittling her body to bony poverty, carving her face into an ax blade.
Eema’s eyes now are brutal black buttons, and she no longer paints. Of course she doesn’t. Her palettes and brushes were stolen from her and thrown onto the rubbish heap. But she seems to have lost the will, the desire to paint as well. God has robbed her of her gift, Eema declares. “Living now is by the minute only,” she explains to her daughter. “To think an hour ahead is impossible.” Though, in fact, it seems to Rashka that Eema never stops thinking about the next hour. Where they can lay hands on a few scraps of food, some bread, another blanket, a pair of shoes, paper for the toilet, matches for a candle. Meanwhile, God has taken her gift. For safekeeping perhaps? This is a theory Rashka wishes she could propose, but she is too fearful. What if it turns out that God is just a little bit vengeful? What then? Maybe He’s punishing Eema for some sin she has committed. Some secret transgression. And if so, what might He do to Eema’s little goat?
The latest of their residences is a so-called Judenhaus. An officially designated house for Jews located on the corner of the Duisburger Strasse and the Konstanzer Strasse. Jews are still permitted bus passes if the distance to an assigned workplace is seven kilometers away or more, but the distance, west to east, from the house to the factory where they must work is only six kilometers, so they walk. And in their travels to and fro in the cold, they are often jeered at, spat upon, struck, or otherwise assaulted due to the stars they wear. Once, a shopkeeper suddenly shoved a broom at them and demanded that they sweep the sidewalk of his shop.
Inside the house, it’s overcrowded squalor from corner to corner. Everyone is hungry, everyone is sick, everyone is afraid because of the rumor mill that says that Berliner Jews are being shipped like cattle to a ghetto in Occupied Poland called Litzmannstadt. Trains leave on a weekly basis from Bahnhof Grunewald, the rumors inform them. “Transports” they are called.
Uncle Fritz, meanwhile, has excelled at becoming a privileged Jew. Two years before, he had wangled membership on the board of the Jewish association organized under the control of the Gestapo’s Jewish Desk, Referat IV B4.
“We’re trying to save what we can,” Feter Fritz explains in a serious tone to his sister.
“You’re trying to save yourself, Fritz,” his sister counters.
“Well, that’s a rather vile thing to say to one’s own flesh and blood, Lavinia. Even for you.”
“Vile it may be,” she shrugs. But true.
“There are many good men. Important men. Courageous men. Good, solid, salt-of-the-earth menschen who have taken on the thankless responsibility of representing our communities to the SS. Do you doubt that?”
“It’s you I doubt, Fritzl,” she says. “You.”
Now, on a cold February night, Feter Fritz stands on the steps of the interior stairwell of the Judenhaus. He is here to prove his worth. Eema and Rashka stand with him. Rashka is silent, her hand in her mother’s grasp. Her uncle’s chin is poorly shaven. His once immaculately manicured fingernails are dirty and ragged. His hair is greasy, and his clothing hangs on him like he’s dressed in a bag of rags. But the most alarming element of his appearance is not what he’s wearing. It’s what he’s not wearing.
“Friedel, you’re not wearing the star,” her eema is saying, her voice low, concerned for him, yes, but also with a note of panic. But Feter’s mouth is set. His eyes are dark with determination. He speaks closely to them.
“You must listen to me now,” he instructs. “Are you listening, Lavinia? I need you to listen to me.”
“I’m listening. Yes, for God’s sake.” Her eema’s eyes are wide. Her expression raw.
“Tomorrow morning,” Feter Fritz begins, “before you leave for work, I want you to pack whatever you have of value and take it with you.”
“What do we have of value any longer?”
“Listen, Lavinia,” he scolds her impatiently. “Don’t talk. Anything of value. Any food you can carry without drawing attention. Fill your pockets. Sew what you can into the linings of your clothes. Whatever money. Whatever jewelry. Anything of value that you can lay hands on. But do it covertly. You don’t want to encourage questions from anyone.”
“And why am I doing this?”
“Because tomorrow morning, you are not going to work,” he informs them, followed by the unconscious tic of the German glance—his eyes darting from side to side to safeguard against eavesdroppers. “The Gestapo,” he whispers grimly. “They’re planning an aktion. In the factories.” An aktion on a scale that dwarves everything that’s past, he says. Raids all over town. Gestapo and Kripo men. Companies of Waffen-SS troops dispatched with empty lorries to fill with Jews. “Are you understanding me, Vinni?” He so seldom calls her by this name from their childhood.