“But what are we to do, Tatte?” Mamme wants to know. “You and I? Gelika, what is your father saying?”
But Angelika understands that her mother has been erased from the conversation.
“You should go. Now,” her father commands. “I think I may have been followed.”
The fear rises in Mamme’s voice. “Followed? Followed by whom?”
Again, to Angelika he speaks. “Go. Your mamme and I will look after ourselves. Go. You must.”
Mamme is whispering frantically. “I don’t understand. I don’t understand… What is happening?” But her daughter understands perfectly, and she is on the move. She kisses her parents quickly. Deflects her mamme’s beseeching voice.
“Goodbye, Mamme. Goodbye, Tatte.” That’s all she says. What else can she say but goodbye? Vacating the mezzanine, she forces the image of her parents into the background of her mind as the martial sweep of the newsreel anthem reaches its crescendo.
The sound of the film is muted as Angelika descends the stairs to the lobby, hurried but measured. Excusing herself, she shoves past a slower-moving patron, who squawks a mild complaint as he’s forced to clear the way, causing him to bump into two men in leather trench coats who are ascending the steps to the mezzanine. The leather coats and snap-brim hats are the standard uniform of the Gestapo, so it’s the patron who’s apologizing now. Angelika makes it past without a whiff of Stapo interest.
Cutting through the lobby crowd, she’s almost at the doors to the street. Almost free! When a hand seizes her by the wrist.
“Not so fast,” she hears the man instruct. She doesn’t call out, just tenses for confrontation. The hand belongs to a slyly handsome young man with flaxen blond hair and eyes like gray smoke. He wears a snap-brim hat and an expensive cashmere coat, but there is something of the working-class scavenger about him. A handsome fox from the proletariat. Drawing her in closer, he has a question for her. “So. Where is your star, Liebchen?”
He gives her a piece of advice. He, the man with the flaxen hair. Make yourself useful to them. These are the words he speaks as she and her parents are loaded into the rear of a green police lorry along with other captured U-boats. One of the Gestapo trench coats calls over to him with a certain camaraderie. “Not a bad haul. A good day’s work!” The blond fox grins, showing teeth, but then squeezes Angelika’s arm and whispers into her ear. His lips close. His breath heated. “Make yourself useful to them,” he instructs. Nützlich is the word he chooses for her. Helpful. Beneficial. Valuable.
The stones in the oldest Jewish cemetery in Berlin have been desecrated. Workers have used pickaxes, spades, and sledgehammers to smash tombstones and to dig a zigzagged air-raid trench through the burial ground. Fractured gravestones bear the Magen David and epitaphs in Hebrew. Bones have been cleared like roots. This is Grosse Hamburger Strasse. Across the street from the cemetery stands what was once the Jewish Community Home for the Aged, but the elderly inhabitants have long since been evacuated eastward. Now the building is the Grosse Hamburger Strasse Sammellager, a collection camp for Berlin Jews. An assembly camp run by the Gestapo for filling deportation quotas set by the SS Jewish Bureau, Referat IV B4.
Inside, Angelika is shivering alone, confined to a dark portion of the building’s cellar. She had been beaten and bloodied for two days in a Gestapo cellar in the Burgstrasse before being trucked over to this place and dumped. It was not the first time in her life she had been struck. As a child, her mother would slap her or come after her with a wooden kitchen paddle, and after a certain age, after certain changes in her body, her father would slap her too. Once after she was caught kissing that goyische boy from the bottle factory, her tatte struck her so hard with a closed fist that she saw stars in the middle of the day.
But never before had she been subjected to a sustained beating as she had been in the Burgstrasse cellar. It was a pounding, administered by a Gestapo brute in his shirtsleeves, who had “interrogated” her while she was manacled to a chair. He struck her face and split her lip. Tore her bloodstained blouse and struck her shoulders with a cudgel, punched her in the stomach so that she vomited bile. Twice he jammed the muzzle of a pistol against her forehead and threatened to fire. And all the while repeating the same demand. Talk. Yet she had nothing to say. She did not know anything. She was not privy to names or locations of black marketeers. She knew nothing of the forger who had produced the false identity card she had been arrested carrying.
Tatte had always handled all the logistics. Their contacts for food. For a roof over their heads. She never knew the names of their hiders and seldom even recognized where they were. Somewhere in Little Wedding? Somewhere in Berlin-Kreuzberg? They traveled during blackout hours. No lights beyond an electric torch with colored tissue over the lens. But this brute didn’t really seem interested in her explanations. He didn’t really seem interested in answers at all. His entire justification for existence was to beat. To strike. To hurt. This continued until she lost all track of time. Until she felt each blow like a numbing vibration thrumming through her body, until she wondered if the dim light of the cellar would be the last light she would ever see.
But a day later, her lip scabbed, her eyes blackened, she was transferred here. To the Grosse Hamburger assembly camp. Deposited alone in another cellar, where she now assumes she is waiting for death. She assumes that the beatings will begin again and that when the next brute finally grows weary of dispensing the blows, she will actually get the bullet. Since she met Audi Goldstein when she was fourteen and he took her in the rear of his glossy Invicta, since then she has learned many things about men and their desires. Men and their weaknesses. Men and their brutalities.
A slash of light cuts across her face as a key clanks in the lock and the door thuds open. A uniformed SS warder steps in. “On your feet, Jewess,” he tells her, already bored with the process of her death. She is taken to a room abovestairs. A harshly lit room, where she is seated at an oaken table. Can this be the room where she will be shot? It seems a bit too neat. And would they really bother to seat her in a chair to shoot her? There are no manacles here as there were in Burgstrasse. A photo of the SS chief, Herr Reichsführer Himmler, hangs above the head of the table, gazing into the air, as if she is too insignificant for him to notice. The same bored SS man who brought her in now stands by as the door creaks open, and in comes a man dressed in a tailored, double-breasted suit and a silk tie, sporting a party badge on his lapel. He seems harried as he strides into the room, all business, and plops himself into the chair facing Angelika. Opens a sheath of papers and scowls at them.
“You are the Jewess Angelika Sara Rosen?” he asks, though it doesn’t sound like a question as much as a dreary accusation. His eyes flick upward in response to her silence. “Answer, please,” he tells her. A small moment of instruction.
“Yes.” Angelika obeys.
“I am Kriminal-Kommissar Dirkweiler. But you will address me as Herr Kommandant,” he informs her.
She repeats the lesson. “Yes. Herr Kommandant.”
“You were found in possession of illegal identification documents,” says he. This time, all he needs do is flick his eyes upward to prompt her reply.
“Yes. Yes, Herr Kommandant.”
“Forged documents.”
She swallows. “May I ask, Herr Kommandant? Where are my parents?”
The man frowns absently. “Your parents? They are in the room above us. What we call the Ost Zimmer. Tomorrow you will join them on the train that will transport you to the east. Unless…”