Pennies For Hitler (3 page)

They will stop now, thought Georg dazedly. Papa will tell them there are no Jews here. He will explain how poets are above politics …

The student with bright blue eyes, eyes like the sky in summer, bent to grab Papa’s legs. Papa fell down between the black robes of the students.

‘He is a Jew too!’ yelled the student. ‘He tried to hide, but the truth is out! Our Herr Professor is a Jew!’

‘
Jude! Jude! Jude!
’ It was as though the students had only one voice now.

Mutti screamed. The scream went on and on. She managed two steps towards Papa but Frau Doktor Hansmeyer grabbed her arm. Mutti shook it off but someone else held her too. She struggled and her hat fell off.

‘Papa!’ Georg jumped off his chair. He was lost in trousered legs and skirts. He couldn’t see. Someone grabbed his wrist.

He heard Papa yell, ‘Marlene!’ That was Mutti’s name. Papa called, ‘Marlene, save Georg!’ and then more faintly, ‘
Ich liebe dich
.’ I love you.

Georg strained to see between legs and skirts. What was happening to Papa?

‘Mutti!’ he yelled. ‘Mutti!’ He couldn’t even see her now. The orchestra played again, as though they tried to drown out the yells.

Suddenly Mutti wrenched his wrist from the grip of whoever held it. She lifted him up. Georg was much too big to be carried, but Mutti carried him down the Hall, stumbling in her high-heeled shoes.

Georg tried to look back, to see what had happened to Papa. They had to help him! But Mutti pressed his face hard into her shoulder. She made a strange, harsh noise that might have been a sob.

Down the wide stone stairs, worn with hundreds of years of students’ feet. Down, down. Behind them people yelled. Someone called, ‘Frau Doktor Marks!’

Were they trying to help them? Perhaps they had rescued Papa. Perhaps the Hall was orderly again.

Georg looked back up the stairs. A young man stood there in a black student robe. ‘You have a little Jew rat, Frau Doktor Marks! How does it feel to have a Jew rat for a child?’

For a moment Georg thought the boy was going to follow them down the stairs. But he vanished back into the Hall. The screams had stopped. The crowd was singing again now.

Mutti staggered against the stairwell. She put him down, and wrenched off her shoes.

‘Run,’ she whispered. ‘As fast as you can, Georg.’ She took his hand, holding her shoes in her other hand. Georg glanced up the stairs again. But no one watched them now.

They ran, down the stairs, into the foyer. The cream cakes had been set out on the white-clothed tables, and the coffee urn. The women in white aprons stared at Mutti’s feet in their torn stockings, at the running boy and woman with no shoes and hat.

Mutti pulled him out the door.

People ran towards them across the stone paving of the quadrangle. Georg felt snow fingers of terror down his back. But the people weren’t chasing them. They kneeled by the bodies crumpled beneath the window. Blood gleamed on the green grass and cobblestones. The bodies looked like scarecrows blown over in the wind.

‘Papa,’ he cried. ‘Where is Papa?’

No, Papa couldn’t be in that crumple of black robes and broken bodies. He would have made the students let him go. He would be running after them.

‘We have to wait for Papa!’

Mutti jerked his hand. ‘Run,’ she panted. Her hair was loose from its pins. ‘Georg, run!’

The gargoyles stared down, grinning and poking out their tongues.

Mutti dragged him across the quadrangle and down into the street. She slipped her shoes back on, then pulled Georg towards the tram stop, gripping his hand like she would never let it go. Georg’s mind felt like ice.

How many bodies lay in that puddle of black and blood?

Had one of them been Papa’s?

Chapter 3

The tram clattered towards them on its tracks. Mutti didn’t seem to notice the wind that whipped her skirts as she glanced back towards the University. Her face was as blank as its stone.

Papa would come soon, Georg told himself. He had to come soon.

The tram stopped in front of them with a creak and a clang. Mutti hauled him up the steps, onto a hard wooden seat. She didn’t let go of Georg’s hand even on the tram, though he wasn’t a little boy now whose hand had to be held in case he fell off. But Georg didn’t pull it away.

Mutti didn’t speak to the conductor either, just handed him money for their tickets. She gazed out as though looking at something Georg couldn’t see.

They got out at the stop before Tante Gudrun’s house.

The wind pushed at Mutti’s skirts again. It smelled of flowers, of summer to come. Georg wished the wind would go away. If the wind stopped there might be peace, like in Papa’s poem. He would hear Papa’s voice: ‘
Quiet touches the treetops …
’

Mutti still didn’t speak as she hurried him across the road and down the footpath, through Tante Gudrun’s neat white-painted gate, along the path between the yellow daffodils. Mutti pulled the door bell over and over, as though the noise could make up for the words she couldn’t speak.

At last Tante opened the door; she was wearing her navy-blue silk dress. Tante’s house always smelled of turnips, which was strange, because Georg had never eaten turnips there. Perhaps the servant ate them in the kitchen.

Tante stared at Mutti’s face, her messy hair. Mutti’s face looked set in stone, like someone had decided to make a gargoyle pretty. ‘Marlene? What is it?’

Mutti shoved past Tante, into the hall with its soft flowered carpet. She opened the door of Tante’s living room. ‘Stay in here,’ she said to Georg in English. ‘Promise? Don’t move.’

Georg was so relieved that she could speak he nodded, even though he wanted to yell at her, to ask about Papa, about the Jews. To ask, ‘What’s happening? When can we see Papa?’

Instead he waited. He sat on the brocade sofa and looked at the flowered carpet. He thought of Papa, of blood and gargoyles. He thought of the bodies on the grass, then forced the thought away. He tried to make his mind empty, to stop the pain. He tried to find a story, any story. The stories were all gone. Even the rest of the words of Papa’s last poem seemed frozen somewhere he couldn’t reach.

Now and then he heard voices from the kitchen. At last he moved closer to the door, to listen.

‘Please, Gudrun,’ Mutti kept pleading. There was a mumble and then, ‘Please help us.’

Perhaps Mutti wanted Tante Gudrun to ask Onkel Klaus to take his motor to the University to fetch Papa. Papa wouldn’t
know that they were here. He’d worry. Mutti should telephone Lotte so that she could tell Papa where they were when he came home again …

He remembered the students’ laughter as the young man screamed. Pictures of the bodies seeped into his mind again. He tried to push them out but they seeped back. Bodies and blood, black student robes, red blood, white faces on green grass. The young men’s faces and —

He thrust his fist into his mouth to stop from crying out. Papa’s face all bloody on one side, the other side the skin all white, the eye staring towards them as though it couldn’t see, would never see again.

It couldn’t be Papa. It was someone else! It had to be! But if it were … then Onkel Klaus could take Papa to the hospital. The doktors would make him better. They’d bandage up his head so you couldn’t see the red, just like they’d bandaged up Georg’s foot when he had cut it at the lake.

‘Your foot has gone white!’ Papa had joked. ‘Poor Georg, one pink foot and one white.’ They’d laugh at Papa’s white head and Lotte would bring in stewed pears with cream …

The students must know it was all a mistake now. Papa was not a Jew. He was their teacher. A teacher should be respected. They’d say that they were sorry. The tall student would beg Papa’s pardon.

He tried to tell himself the dragon story again. Stories made time pass. But the world of stories had vanished from his brain.

There was a series of clicks outside the door as someone pressed the phone to get the operator. He heard Mutti’s voice, fast and urgent. Was she calling the University, to speak to Papa or the Rektor? Was she calling their house to talk to Lotte?

He couldn’t make out the words. He had never heard Mutti speak like that, as though a shell of iron suddenly covered her, each sound tight and hard.

Mutti put the receiver down. She opened the door, stepped into the room, then shut the door carefully. He ran to her and she held him close. For a second he was afraid that she’d
feel
hard and stiff too. But she felt just the same.

‘Mutti, what’s happening?’ He spoke English, because Papa might be hurt and so it seemed right to speak his language now.

‘The brave Aryan Super-race is getting rid of the unclean.’ Her voice was flat.

She wasn’t crying, so he couldn’t cry either. Her face looked like it hurt not to cry. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘There is nothing to understand. Just hate. Just stupidity. How can you make the stupid see sense?’

‘Mutti, please.’

‘The students have been going through the records, to see if anyone at the University was Jewish.’

‘Because Jews aren’t allowed in the University?’

She shut her eyes for a second, then opened them and nodded. ‘Some of the staff and students think that anyone who had a Jewish grandfather or even great-grandmother must be a Jew too. They think one Jewish ancestor taints your blood. They believe lies because they want them to be true. They think the Nazi Party will give them good jobs after what they did today. And you know the worst?’ Mutti clasped her hands together, almost as if she was praying. ‘They are right.’

Georg let the last question out. He tried to make his voice strong but it came out as a whisper. ‘Why did they call Papa a Jew?’

Mutti took a breath. Her face still looked as cold as the stone of the University.

‘Your father’s grandfather was Jewish. To them that makes your father Jewish too.’ She clenched her fists like Georg did at the dentist’s, as though the next words hurt almost too much to say. ‘It means they think
you
are a Jew.’

‘I am not a Jew!’

‘To them you are.’

‘No! We measured our heads in class today. I have an Aryan head. A perfect Aryan head! Herr Doktor Schöner said so.’

‘Your teacher is wrong. You can’t tell what race people are by their head size.’

Georg stared at her numbly. Herr Doktor Schöner was a clever man. Mutti was just a mother, not a scholar. The Adolf Hitler Schule wouldn’t let Herr Doktor Schöner teach things that were wrong.

There are no Jews in our family, thought Georg desperately. Jews killed babies. They poisoned wells. How could you suddenly be a Jew? But the students had yelled, ‘
Jude! Jude!
’ as they grabbed Papa. The student had called him a ‘little Jew rat’.

‘Do they think that you are a —’ he stumbled over the word ‘
—
Jew too?’

‘Perhaps, because I married your father.’

Could you catch being Jewish, like you caught the flu? It didn’t make sense. Nothing made sense. Today was broken. His life was broken. Later the shattered pieces might come together. ‘When can we see Papa? Will he be all right?’

She answered neither question. ‘Georg, you must be brave. Can you do that?’

He didn’t know. He nodded anyway. ‘Did — did they hurt Papa?’

‘Yes,’ said Mutti. That word was iron too.

He wanted to ask how badly Papa was hurt. But his mouth wouldn’t make the words. Instead he whispered, ‘Where is he?’

‘Georg … I can’t answer that. I have no time to explain. You have to get to England: to Aunt Miriam. Now! As soon as we can get you there. You will be safe in England.’

Papa had promised they weren’t going to England. But somehow he knew that this morning and this afternoon were different worlds. ‘We can’t go to England till Papa is well.’

‘Georg, please. For Papa’s sake.’

Mutti shut her eyes, then opened them again, as though what was inside her head hurt too much to see. ‘For my sake. For Papa’s sake. Miriam was right. She has been right all along. We should have left a year ago. Now,’ she took a breath, ‘we need you to be safe. That’s what your father said —’

Mutti’s voice stopped, like her clockwork had run down. She clenched her fists again. Georg could see her nails cut into her palms, as though one pain made another easier to bear. When she spoke again her voice was like the wireless, clipped and remote.

‘The Nazis won’t let Jews leave Germany without permission these days. We can’t risk trying to get it now, in case they are looking for us after what happened today. Even if I managed to leave Germany the English government might not let me in. They won’t let many Jewish refugees into England. And now I too would be a refugee.’

‘But we went there last year —’

‘Last year I was with Papa.’ Mutti’s voice almost broke on the word. ‘But you have an English passport. If you can get out of Germany you can go to Aunt Miriam in England. But it will be hard to get you out. If I try to come with you they might catch us both.’

‘I have to go without you? Without Papa?’

‘We will come when we can.’ Her voice held truth; but it held other things too.

‘I want to go home!’ The words burst from him.

‘It’s not safe.’

He stared at her. How could home not be safe? Unless the students were there. They knew where Papa lived.

‘Georg? Will you go to England? Please?’

Mutti had never spoken like that before. Grown-ups said: ‘Do this, do that.’ It was an order, even if they added ‘please’. This was the first thing Mutti had ever asked of him. Her voice pleaded, and her eyes.

‘Yes,’ said Georg.

He felt her relax a little beside him.

‘When do I have to go?’

‘Soon. Some … friends are coming. I don’t know them well.’

‘But you said they are friends?’

‘Friends are people who help you.’ Her voice was bitter now. ‘They help people like us. They will get you out of Germany. I phoned them. They said they will be here soon.’ She held him close.

‘Mutti? I’m hungry.’

She almost smiled at that. ‘Tante will give you food.’ Her voice twisted. ‘She will do that, at least.’