Lilac Girls (5 page)

The taller guard took the shovel. “Of course I know it. Who hasn't been to the Christmas market there? Have you registered as Volksdeutsche?”

Volksdeutsche was the German term for ethnic Germans living in countries other than Germany. The Nazis pressured Polish citizens with German heritage like Matka to register as Volksdeutsche. Once registered, they got extra food, better jobs, and property confiscated from Jews and non-German Poles. Matka would never accept Volksdeutsche status, since that showed allegiance to Germany, but this put her at risk, because she was going against the Reich.

“No, but I am mostly German. My father was only part Polish.”

Psina scratched the soil around the smooth spot and pecked something there.

“If you were German, you'd not be breaking rules, would you? Withholding what is due the Reich?”

Matka touched his arm. “It is hard dealing with all of this. Can you not understand? Imagine your own family.”

“My own family would have handed what they had to the Reich.”

The SS man took the shovel and continued toward the spot.

Ten…eleven…

“I'm so terribly sorry,” Matka said, following him.

The man ignored Matka and took one more step.

Twelve.

How far would he dig before he hit the box?

“Please, give us another chance,” Matka said. “The rules are so new.”

The guard turned, leaned on the shovel, and gave Matka a thorough looking over. He smiled, and I could see his teeth clearly, like little chewing gum tablets.

He leaned closer to her and lowered his voice. “Maybe you know the rule about curfew?”

“Yes,” Matka said, a tiny crease between her brows. She shifted in her shoes.

“That is a rule you can break.” The SS man took Matka's medal between his thumb and forefinger and rubbed it, watching her the whole time.

“One needs a pink pass to violate curfew,” Matka said.

“I have them here in my pocket.” He dropped the medal and put his hand over his heart.

“I don't understand,” Matka said.

“I think you do.”

“Are you saying you will let this go if I come visit you?”

“If that is what you heard—”

“The Germans I know are cultured people. I can't imagine you would ask a mother of two to do that.”

The man cocked his head to one side, bit his lip, and picked up the shovel. “I am sorry you feel that way.”

“Wait,” Matka said.

The man lifted the shovel into the air above his head.

“My God, no!” Matka cried. She reached for his arm, but it was too late. Once the shovel was in the air, there was no stopping it.

A
t midnight, Father and I walked six blocks from our basement apartment to a nicer part of Düsseldorf, to the white stone townhomes where servants swept the streets and pinched back geraniums in window boxes. It was late September, but the air was warm still, “Führer-weather” they called it, since it permitted Hitler success in his campaigns. It had certainly worked with Poland.

I climbed the steps to the double doors, inset with filigreed, white-painted ironwork over frosted glass. I pressed the silver button. Was Katz even home? There was a faint glow behind the frosted glass, but the gas lanterns to either side of the door were not lit. Father waited on the street in the darkness, arms hugging his midsection.

I was twenty-five that year when Father's symptoms grew bad enough for him to seek out his favorite old Jewish treater of the sick, a man named Katz. We were not allowed to call Jews doctors. The term “treaters of the sick” was preferred. Nor were Aryans allowed to frequent non-Aryan doctors, but my father seldom followed the rules.

The doorbell chimed somewhere deep in the house. I'd never set foot in a Jew's house before and was in no hurry to do so, but Father insisted I accompany him. I wanted to spend as little time there as possible.

A brighter light appeared behind the frosted glass, and a dark shape moved toward me. The door to my right opened a crack to reveal a former medical school classmate of mine, one of the many Jewish students no longer welcome at the university. He was fully dressed, tucking his shirt into his pants.

“What do you want this time of night?” he said.

Behind him Katz descended the stairs, steps soundless on thick carpet, the train of his midnight-blue dressing gown fanned out behind him. He hesitated, hunched like a crone, eyes wide. Expecting the Gestapo?

Father hobbled up the front steps and stood next to me. “Excuse me, Herr Doktor,” he said, one hand on the doorjamb. “I am sorry to bother you, but the pain is unbearable.”

Once Katz recognized Father, he smiled and ushered us in. As we passed, the former medical student looked at me with narrowed eyes.

Katz led us into his paneled study, three times the size of our apartment, the walls lined with shelves of leather-bound books. It had a spiral staircase, which led up to the second level, to a railed balcony lined with more bookshelves. Katz turned a knob on the wall, and the crystal chandelier above us, hung with a thousand icicle pendants, came to life.

Katz eased Father down into a chair that looked like a king's throne. I ran the tips of my fingers along the chair's arm, across the red damask woven with threads of gold, smooth and cool.

“It's no bother at all,” Katz said. “I was just reading. My bag, please, and a glass of water for Herr Oberheuser,” he said over his shoulder to the former medical student. The young man pressed his lips together in a hard line and left the room.

“How long has the pain been like this?” Katz asked.

I'd never known many Jews, but had read many accounts of them in schoolbooks and in
Der Stürmer.
Grasping and controlling. Cornering the market on law and medical jobs. But Katz seemed almost happy to see Father—strange, since we'd intruded on him at such an hour. This was a man happy in his work.

“Since dinner,” Father said, hugging his belly.

I was almost done with medical school at the time and could have counseled my father, but he insisted on seeing Katz.

I studied the room as Katz examined him. The black-and-white marble fireplace, the grand piano. The books on the shelves looked oiled and dusted, each one worth more than I made in a year, trimming roasts for
Onkel
Heinz part-time at his butcher shop. There was no doubt a well-used volume of Freud among them. Several lamps stood about the room throwing down pools of light even when no one was using them. If only Mutti could have seen that wastefulness.

Katz fingered the sides of Father's neck. As he turned Father's hand to take his pulse, the light caught a fat letter
K
monogrammed in silver thread on Katz's dressing-gown sleeve.

“Working at the Horschaft factory may be causing this,” he said to Father. “I would stop working there immediately.”

Father winced, his skin sallow. “But we can't live without that job.”

“Well, at least work in a ventilated area.”

The former medical student returned with a crystal glass of water and set it on the table next to us. Could he not bring himself to hand it to Father? Little did he know Father was on his side. If he hadn't been so sick, Father would have hidden a whole tramcar of those people in our back bedroom.

Katz shook a pill from a bottle into Father's hand and then smiled. “No charge.”

Was that how they did it? Got you hooked, then charged more later? Our schoolbooks outlined the various strategies Jews used to undermine hardworking Germans. They were taking over the medical world. My professors said they were stingy with their research results and barely shared findings outside their own circles.

While Father took his pill, I browsed the titles on the bookshelf:
Clinical Surgery.
Stages in Embryo Development in Humans and Vertebrates.
Whole shelves of green leather tomes with titles such as
Atlas of the Outer Eye Diseases
and
Atlas of Syphilis and Venereal Diseases.

“You like to read?” Katz asked.

“Herta graduates soon from medical school,” Father said. “On an accelerated track. She's interested in surgery.” I excelled in the few surgery classes I was allowed to take, but being a woman, under national socialism, I was not allowed to specialize in surgery.

“Ah, the surgeon,” Katz said, smiling. “King of doctors, or at least the surgeons think so.” He pulled one of the green books from the shelf. “
Atlas of General Surgery.
Have you read it?”

I said nothing as he pushed the book toward me. It seemed some Jews shared.

“Once you learn everything in here, bring it back, and I'll give you another,” he said.

I did not touch it. What would people say, me taking the book of a Jew?

“You are too generous, Herr Doktor,” Father said.

“I insist,” Katz said, still holding the book out.

It looked heavy, the leather cover soft, embossed in gold. Could I borrow such a thing? I wanted it. Not so much to read it. I
had
textbooks. Ugly and secondhand, other people's notes scratched in their margins, breadcrumbs in their gutters. This book was a beautiful thing. It would be nice to be seen with it, to walk into class and drop it casually on my desk. Mutti would rage at Father for allowing me to take it, but that alone was worth it.

I took the book from Katz and turned away.

“She's speechless,” Father said. “And a fast reader. She'll return it soon.”

I
T WAS A USEFUL
BOOK
,
in some ways more detailed than our medical school textbooks. In less than one week, I read from “Inflammation and Repair of Tissue” through “Cancer of the Lymphatic System.” The text and color plates provided additional insight into my father's condition. Epithelioma. Sarcoma. Radium treatments.

Once I made it through the last chapter of Katz's book, “Amputations and Prosthesis,” and practiced two new surgical knots described there, I walked to the Jew's house to return it, hoping for another.

When I arrived, the front doors were wide open, and the SS were carrying cardboard boxes of books, Katz's black medical bag, and a white wicker baby carriage, its wheels spinning in midair, to the curb. Someone was plunking out a German folk tune on Katz's piano.

I held the book tight to my chest and left for home. Katz would not be coming back for it. Everyone knew of these arrests. Most of the time they happened in the night. It was sad to see someone's possessions taken in such a way, but the Jews had been warned. They knew the Führer's requirements. This was unfortunate, but not new, and it was for the good of Germany.

Less than a week later I spied a new family with five sons and a daughter carrying suitcases and a birdcage into that house.

M
Y MOTHER WAS HAPPY
to work in her brother Heinz's meat market, across the bridge in Oberkassel, a wealthy part of town, and she had gotten me a job there too. It was a small shop, but Heinz filled every inch with meat. He hung hams and long ribs of pork outside along the front of the store like socks on a clothesline and displayed whole hogs spread-eagled, bellies slit wide, glistening entrails scooped and saved.

At first I blanched at the sight, but as a medical student interested in surgery, I gradually grew to see beauty in the most unlikely places. The startling ivory of a splayed rib cage. A calf's severed head, peaceful as if asleep, a fringe of lashes black against the damp fur.

“I make good use of every part of an animal,” Heinz often said. “Everything but the squeal.” He boiled pig parts on the stove all day until the windows fogged and the shop somehow smelled both putrid and sweet as only a butcher shop can.

As greater numbers of Jews left the city, we became one of the few quality meat shops left, and business improved daily. One afternoon Heinz passed along news benefiting the customers lined up two deep at the front counter.

“You have to get over there to the
platz,
ladies. They are selling everything from the warehouses. I heard Frau Brandt found a sable coat there with a silk lining. Hurry, now.”

No one said they were selling items taken from the Jews, but we all knew.

“How awful they took people's things away like that,” said
Tante
Ilsa, Heinz's wife, who avoided the shop as much as she could. When she did come, she brought me a jar of her strawberry marmalade, which I'd once complimented. Ilsa kept her coat wrapped tight around her even though it was summer and stayed only two minutes. “It's a sin to pick through someone's things as if they're dead.”

Tante
Ilsa paid for most of my medical school costs. A kind praying mantis of a woman, tall and gentle with a head too small for her body, she'd been left a great deal of money by her mother and used it sparingly, no matter how
Onkel
Heinz brayed.

Heinz smiled, causing his piggy eyes to disappear into the folds of his fat face. “Oh, don't worry, Ilsa. They probably
are
dead by now,” he said.

The patrons turned away, but I knew he was right. If Ilsa was not careful, her own considerable belongings would end up there alongside the Jews'. The gold cross around her neck was no protection. Did Ilsa know what Heinz did in the refrigerated room? Perhaps on an instinctual level, the way a calf knows to become restless on slaughter day.

“You shed a tear when the Jew Krystel's shop closed, Ilsa. My own wife a Jew friend, shopping at the competition. That is loyalty,
nicht
?”

“He has those baby hens I like.”

“
Had,
Ilsa. It doesn't help my business when this gets around. Soon you'll be on the
Pranger-Liste.
”

I held my tongue, but I'd already seen
Tante
Ilsa's name on the
Pranger-Liste,
the public list of German women who shopped at Jewish stores, posted about the town, a black stripe running diagonally across it.

“You don't see Krystel's wife in
here,
” Heinz said. “Thank God. And no more Frau Zates, either
.
Wants a cabbage but will only pay for a half. Who buys half a cabbage? I cut it, and who buys the other half? No one, that's who.”

“Why should she buy whole when she needs only half?” Ilsa asked.

“
Mein Gott,
she does it on purpose. Can't you see?”

“Keep your thumb off the scale, or you'll have
no
customers, Heinz.”