The Kaminsky Cure Read online

  What could an Ortsgruppenleiter do when he was squeezed like that? Franzi Wimmer did what was needed to keep his nose clean, of course. He didn’t find it easy with Jägerlein, who wouldn’t let him in until he threatened to have her arrested. But she was only an ignorant peasant woman after all. The animals and wireless were taken away. The rabbits got eaten; I don’t know what happened to Brutus, but everyone knows Nazis are kind to pedigree dogs – it fits their ideology. The only animals we’ve got left now are the rats that I hear occasionally squeaking and rustling in the cellar when I’m sent to get coal in the dark. I could do without them, but apparently we belong together.

  I’m not sure how much I was looking forward to my first day at school before the revelation of my semi-Jewishness, but I’m certainly not looking forward to it now at all. So I’m not a proper German after all, I keep thinking; that’s what the village people are, not me. I’m a mistake, a degenerate half-breed, half one of that tribe that proper Germans despise. That’s why we shop where we do and don’t shop where we don’t. Not because we’re proper Germans, but because we’re not. I keep wishing we hadn’t gone up the mountain when we did, so that Pfarrrer Kretschmann wouldn’t have stepped on that Brutus turd and I might at least have been spared the anguish of this knowledge till it was thrust upon me in school. I could have lived out my last days of blissful ignorance in peace. But we did go up the mountain and I’ve had my first history lesson before I’ve even learnt any history: the past can’t be undone.

  Every night now, when I go to bed, I miss Brutus a lot and the bunnies quite a lot. And I hope that somehow I’ll wake up in the morning and find out it was all a bad dream, Brutus and the bunnies are back and after all I’m as Aryan as my hero Heinrich Schmidt. But I never do. Brutus and the bunnies stay gone and I stay half-Jewish, and the first day of school arrives and I’m tormented by questions of propriety. In fact I’m tormented more by them than by the shame of my polluted blood – I find I can live with being half-sub-human so long as no one jeers at me. It’s being humiliated that really bothers me, not the ground of the humiliation. Where should I sit? How should I behave? Should I say ‘Heil Hitler!’ when the others do, or should I keep silent? Each alternative looks perilous. If I say it when I shouldn’t, I’ll be jeered at or worse. But if I don’t say it when I should, I’ll still be jeered at or worse. How is a half-Jew supposed to behave? Sara could tell me, but I never think to ask her, and she never thinks to tell. She’s so used to keeping Gabi’s secrets, it’s second nature to keep her own as well. Besides, it isn’t only Sara. All of them keep secrets because they’re all of them ashamed.

  Anyway, there I am in the playground watching the other kids, and afraid they’re watching me. They know who I am all right, but I don’t know who they are yet. What am I supposed to do? They’re all playing with each other, running about and shouting, and I’m just standing there, trying to look as though I happened to have paused for a moment by the gate to see what’s going on and then I’m going to join in the fun. And while I’m putting on this act, I’m avoiding every eye and watching every face. And that’s when I realise how different my clothes are from the village kids’. I’m wearing outmoded Berlin clothes, some of them ages old hand-me-downs from my brother Martin. But the others are all wearing smart new Austrian national dress, except that Austria isn’t a nation any more; the Nazis call it Ostmark, which sounds to me like some new kind of money. No wonder some of them are eyeing me. I’d look stupid in this outfit even if I wasn’t one of those. I feel a hot flush of resentment at my mother for sending me here in these outlandish togs, which only a short time ago I would have taken to be the outward sign of our Germanic superiority. As if I don’t have enough on my plate already, without having to worry about looking like a scarecrow.

  We’re all waiting our turn to see the village doctor, who’s just arrived on his large motorbike and sidecar, and is going to examine us to make sure we aren’t infectious, deaf, blind or idiotic. If we aren’t, we can go to school; if we are, we can’t. I begin to hope Herr Doktor Koch will find something wrong with me, so that I can go home and escape the terror of this school business. And since I’m half one of those, he very well might. Or perhaps he’ll just turn up his nose and refuse to even look at me. After all, I know the real reason now why we don’t go to him or to the dentist here, and of course he must know it too.

  But my name is called and in I go. Dr Koch says ‘Unbutton your shirt,’ and listens to my chest. He’s sitting on a wooden chair with his leather helmet beside him and his goggles round his neck. His stethoscope hose hangs down between his knees. I gaze at the freckles on his hands and the bluish veins as thick as knotty cords as he lifts the little metal disc and sounds first one of my half-Jewish lungs and then the other. There are little black hairs growing out of the pores on the back of his hands and when I see how loose and wrinkly his skin is, I think he must be very very old. ‘Turn round,’ he says, stirring his finger demonstratively in the air, and now I get the disc on my back. It feels flat and heavy, like those iron weights you put on scales. Now I’m sure he’s going to say ‘I can see you’re half-Jewish,’ and give me a disgusted shove, but no, he merely sighs and holds his big silver pocket watch close to my ear, telling me to say when I can’t hear it as he moves it slowly away. Next it’s whether I can see the figures on the chart on the wall. Then he pats my shoulder and sends me off.

  I’m in, and nobody’s said a thing to me yet! Maybe it won’t be so bad. But then –

  ‘What’re you doing here, Jew-boy?’ a voice behind me inquires, and I feel my guts turn over and twist.

  Meet Fritzi Wimmer, the Ortsgruppenleiter’s son. He’s staring at me with an unwinking gaze as cold and pitiless as pale blue marble. I watch the future flash by as though in a trailer for a film, if someone can do that who’s never seen a film yet. He’s going to push me around, get the rest to gang up on me and exclude me from their games. For all I know, he’s going to shove me into the lake, which is freezing cold in summer and frozen stiff at any other time. This little Fritz is going to make my life hell. And that’s what he’s seeing too in the trailer that’s simultaneously flashing past his unmoving eyes. He’s got a very pale face with a sharp pointed chin and thinly cruel lips. At least, that’s what they look like to me. If not the perfect example of the Aryan type, he’s near enough, and his tiny brain’s been being poisoned by the steady drip of anti-Semitic venom since the day he was weaned from his mother’s milk. Or before, for all I know. He’s not very big, but he’s going to make up for that by hunting with the pack, where he will be the undisputed leader.

  We both know this at once, and the recognition of it flickers between our eyes. But nothing’s going to happen yet, because we’ve all got to line up and file into the classroom, where a benignly smiling yet vaguely menacing Adolf surveys us from the wall with his magnetic sultry gaze. So this is where I’m going to learn to read and write? But all I want to learn just now is whose side teacher’s on.

  Teacher is Fräulein Meissner, like the Headmaster a Nazi party member – does she have any choice? Does she want any? But like him pedantically fair. Since I’m half-German and half-Jewish, she adopts a proportionately balanced attitude. Perhaps they discussed this in the teachers’ meeting before school started - Item 3. Correct attitude towards mixed race pupils, first degree. That’s how we’re all known, Ilse, Martin, Sara and me – mixed race first degree. If only one of Gabi’s parents had been Jewish, we’d be mixed race, second degree (the Nazis have these grades worked out to the last decimal place), which isn’t quite as bad. But as it is we’re saddled with two Jewish grandparents and a Jewish mother, and there are only two things worse than that: having a Jewish father or being kosher Jews, the full real thing. Anyway Fräulein Meissner isn’t going to tyrannise me like young Fritz and his gang, but she is going to put me by myself in the back row like Sara before me. Unlike Sara, however, I won’t have to sit behind someone with head-lice. This year there isn’t anyo
ne with head-lice. You’ve got to hand it to Adolf, he’s really cleaned things up.

  Fräulein Meissner has the fairest hair I’ve ever seen. It’s so fair it’s anaemic. She wears it parted in the middle and pulled back severely into a bun at the nape of her neck. But there’s nothing severe about her face or figure, both of which are all curvy maternal – aching, you might say, to bear a son for the Fatherland as the Führer expects all true German women to do. Perhaps when her soldier fiancé returns from France she’ll go ahead and bear one, because really she’s just maternity waiting to happen. But at the moment I’m more interested in her generosity to me. She doesn’t call me a half-Jew in class, she doesn’t look at me with open or veiled contempt, she asks me questions as often as she asks the others, and I’m even allowed to say ‘Heil Hitler!’ to our mural Adolf and join in the prayer for Führer and Fatherland at the beginning of school, just like all the rest, just like proper Germans. Yes, even if she is a Nazi (and perhaps she only is one so that she can keep her job?), it seems as though she’s just. And who knows, her motherly instincts may even turn out to be stronger than whatever ideological convictions she may have. Anyway, I’m going to work on them (the motherly instincts, I mean – I can’t do much about her convictions). Yes, things may turn out all right if only I can get away fast enough after the last lesson and give Fritzi Wimmer the slip.

  And that’s exactly what I do. Lugging my schoolbag on my back, I bolt for it as soon as school is over. And either little Fritz has lost interest in me already, or else he’s biding his time. Whatever it is, for the present I’m safe.

  Next morning he ignores me until I unwisely pass too close on the way to the boys’ toilet during break. ‘Push off, Yid,’ is his counsel, delivered in a voice as featureless as his cold blue gaze. I take this advice and nothing happens, except I nearly wet my pants. Nobody else says anything to me. They almost all treat me as though I’m invisible, boys and girls alike. That’s all right by me, especially as I can answer more of the questions Fräulein Meissner asks than the others can, and she seems to like that. But a sense of caution warns me I’d better not stick out, and I make sure I don’t answer all the questions that I can. Perhaps that’s something bred into my genes.

  And so it goes on. I’m accepted as an outsider, a nonentity, a sort of shadow that anyone can step on but nobody needs to, because I keep silent and out of the way. If my forebodings are right and Fritzi really does have it in for me, I must be quite far down the hit list. Which can’t be said for –

  4

  Some of our relations

  Many of whom dropped Gabi when Maria, her best if not her only school-friend, persuaded her to become a Christian. When she later married a Lutheran Pastor, nearly all the others dropped her too. She’d gone over to the Gentiles, she no longer belonged to them. All except her father and sister Frieda, who being agnostic didn’t care what she was, and her mother, who, being already dead, didn’t care either. And sloppy good-natured Aunt Hedwig, her mother’s sister. Apart from her father and sister, Aunt Hedwig was the only relative to call on her after her marriage, or write little letters to her as the years passed. Naturally Hedwig’s letters grew less frequent as the distance in time and space expanded. And once the Nazis got their claws into the Jews of Germany, they nearly dried up altogether. But a trickle still flowed, jerky and erratic like the passage of a single raindrop down a dusty window pane. Congratulations on the birth of each child, for instance. A note of condolence on Frieda’s death. And then another on her father’s. A letter to announce the funeral of a distant uncle in America, or the marriage of a still more distant cousin. Then came the war, and Gabi heard nothing more until the end of my first week in school, when this letter arrived, written on flimsy paper with little wood chips in it.

  My dear Gabi,

  It is such a long time since we have heard from each other, but your Onkel Moritz and I have been so busy with work and we are so tired when we get home that we hardly have the energy to write to any of our relatives now – those that are left – and keep in touch. Moritz has to leave at 5 in the morning and doesn’t get back till 8 or 9, and the physical work is hard on him as he isn’t used to it. His workplace is a long way off, so he’s already tired before he gets there. Mine is not so bad, in a factory quite near here, so I can walk, but still it is from 6 till 6, and the work is hard for someone who isn’t used to machines. And then there’s the walk home and cooking and cleaning etc. Besides, the nearest shop for our people is nearly two kilometres away.

  Here in Berlin so many of our friends have gone that we would be quite lonely if we weren’t too tired to see people anyway. Your cousin Lotte and Solomon have had to move. Their apartment was confiscated and now they are living in a single room, in a building for our people only. They were told to go to Prenzlauer Berg, quite near your father’s old place, and that’s it. Of course, if they had more money, it might be different.

  We counted up last night. About half or more of our friends or relations have left now, some for places where you need visas, others for places where you don’t. We always wonder who will be next. And then the regulations always changing, you just don’t know what to expect.

  Write when you have time. Your life took a different path from ours long ago and it must be still more different now than it used to be. But how long for?

  PS And now we’ve just been told we have to move too. To a single room in the same building as Solomon and Lotte. That’s all we can have now. At least we’ll be together, but where will it all end? Here is the address, in case you have the chance to write …

  Naive as she is (she’s never read a newspaper all through in the whole of her life, and never known anything about the public world except as it affects her private one), Gabi doesn’t need much sophistication to grasp what realities lie behind the coy references to ‘our people’ and ‘the others,’ and where they have to shop. But the one about the places you don’t need visas for – what did Hedwig mean by that?

  Martin, nearly fifteen-year-old Martin, who spotted at once that this letter’s been opened and resealed, can already read between the lines that Gabi never even sees, and he quickly guesses the truth. But that’s too much for her to believe, so she doesn’t, or at any rate tries not to. No, she answers at once, it means being sent to work in one of the occupied territories in the East, not what Martin said. That she cannot believe. For once she’s angry with Martin and shouts at him never to say such a dreadful thing again. But really the anger’s self-directed; she’s shouting down the rising murmur of her own deep-running tide of fears. However she may shout them down in the crowded daytime, though, she always hears their quiet insistence rising in the lonely night. Yes, then the flooding tide returns and beats remorselessly upon her darkened shore. Sometimes, when she just has to tell someone, she whispers her fears to Sara; Sara listens and keeps quiet. Everything settles in her – there’s no one she can tell, unless it is her notebooks.

  As for Martin and the rest of us, Martin’s certain that if what he said is true, it’s never going to happen to him. He’s half-Aryan, to start with, and what’s more, he’s going to show them somehow he’s really one of them. Ilse? She puts her trust in God, much good that will do her. Sara keeps her own counsel, as well as her mother’s. And I? Fritzi Wimmer seems a more clear and present danger to me just now than anything that happens to people I’ve never met in far-away Berlin.

  If Gabi wants corroboration of her daylight optimism, it comes in the sunny letters of Willibald’s nephew Erwin, who I’ve also never met. Erwin’s father Harald, Willibald’s older brother, is a middle-ranking Nazi near Lüneburg. He and his dutiful wife haven’t seen Gabi for years of course, that stands to reason. But Nazis or not, they do send her birthday and Christmas greetings, and what they really think about the Jewish Question nobody exactly knows. As for Erwin himself, he’s one of Germany’s gallant Luftwaffe heroes, a true knight of the air, and he sends us postcards and occasional letters from somewhere i
n occupied France. He’s busy bombing English cities like Coventry and London. Gabi doesn’t exactly like the idea of that, but still, haven’t the English bombed Berlin? And like it or not, it’s a far cry from …from what Martin suggested. How could you believe anything so monstrously barbaric as that is going on in the Reich when people like Erwin serve it? No, things can never be that bad! Look at this note from Erwin, for instance, written only a month after Aunt Hedwig’s.

  Dear everyone at Heimstatt,

  First of all, many thanks for the birthday card and parcel. I was really pleased to get them both.

  I’ve been kept very busy on a night-flying course. It’s very interesting work, and I enjoy it greatly.

  In my spare time, which is unfortunately pretty limited, I have made the acquaintance of a very charming mademoiselle, the daughter of a French air officer. We’ve been round as much as we can of this part of France (I can’t say where) together, and it certainly is almost as pretty as my companion. I’m beginning to improve my French as well. Not that I have forgotten Lerke, of course, who will always have first place in my heart.

  I’ve also had one short leave on which I managed to get home to see my parents – the first time in more than a year. They asked me to send you their greetings.

  (Later) I would have liked to finish this yesterday, but we were called out on duty. And I thought I would be able to write more today, but now we are on standby to fly off on some more exercises, so I had better close here, otherwise it may not catch the post for several days.

  With all good wishes to you all,

  Your

  Erwin

  Obviously only a dutiful courtesy note, even Gabi realises that. Obviously not very inspired. But then knights of the air aren’t supposed to be poets. The main thing is, he’s a decent person. And Gabi notices how she’s still included in the general good wishes, although Erwin’s father is a middling Party big-wig. They asked me to send you their best wishes. Good wishes to you all. Can she read that and believe people like Erwin and his father are out to kill people like Aunt Hedwig and herself?