He turned her face back to his. “I’ll be looking up Miss Rachel Kramer. I’ll be asking her to meet me for coffee that very day, then lunch, and dinner.”
“Dinner? Isn’t that pretty serious?” she whispered.
He pulled her closer. “Very serious. For the rest of my life.”
“And mine,” she promised.
“Mrs. Jason Young—has a nice ring.”
“Rachel Young,” she countered.
“Rachel Young,” he agreed, then kissed her boldly, fully, warmly on the mouth.
The heat that rose from the tips of her toes traveled up her legs and into her torso, filling her heart, rushing to her head. She couldn’t think, couldn’t reason, didn’t care to, but pushed her fingers through his hair, letting his hat fall to the ground, and returned his promise tenfold.
Epilogue
I
N
1950,
the people of Oberammergau pooled their resources and committed to their first Passion Play season since 1934, hoping to show the world a more Christian and temperate side of Germany. General Eisenhower planned to attend with his wife, Mamie. Jason figured that was a sure sign that it was time—it was safe, at last—for his Rachel to return home to her family.
The Youngs flew first by way of Israel and spent five days with a radiant Rivka, RN, and her new husband, Dr. David Schechem, recently settled in a fledgling kibbutz. The Schechems had opened the kibbutz’s first medical clinic, joining other Hebrew believers in building a community, and hoping to welcome many more.
For years from the time that they’d learned of the murder of Rivka’s parents and brother, Jason, Rachel, and Rivka had donated money to help build the new state of Israel, to plant trees and vineyards, praying with Rivka that their efforts would help to save the Jewish remnant surviving the Holocaust.
“And here we are!” Rivka exulted. “It is a beginning.”
“A wondrous beginning.” Rachel embraced her little sister, who’d grown beyond her now, anticipating a life, a family, a community of her own.
Walking onto the plane, waving good-bye to the sister she’d come to love just as much as her birth sister, was harder than Rachel had imagined. Rivka had hidden in Oma’s attic with her and witnessed the biggest transformations in Rachel’s life. She’d trekked over the Alps and skied into Switzerland with her. She’d begged and bargained by
her side for two seats on a weekly, rickety, packed bus through unoccupied France to Barcelona, hopped a moving train with her from Barcelona into Madrid and finally Lisbon. Together, they’d miraculously sailed from Lisbon to New York and battled immigration.
In a story stranger than fiction, Rivka was the sister who’d wrestled and journeyed beside her for five years to the heart of Jesus—Yeshua, the Messiah. A journey neither had imagined in their younger lives, and a journey that had changed them both forever.
When their feet finally stood on German soil in Munich, Rachel trembled, but Jason stood close, his hand on her spine.
The train ride to Oberammergau brought a rush of memories and no small amount of trepidation.
What will it be like, seeing Amelie again? Will she remember me?
They’d received no word from Oma, Lea, or Friederich until six months after the war ended in Europe. Jason and Rachel, reunited and finally able to marry, had immediately sent relief packages. Each month’s package contained a tin of coffee, a tin of tea, and four bars of chocolate, wrapped in clothing or shoes for one family member or another. Sometimes the packages made it through.
Oma wrote most recently that Amelie had grown into a beautiful and capable young woman, one of Oberammergau’s finest up-and-coming dressmakers. So changed was she from the picture of the little boy in the “Bavarian Madonna and Child” that she was certain Rachel would not recognize her. No one in the village questioned her origins—no one except Heinrich Helphman, Friederich’s woodcarving apprentice, who was smitten from the moment he’d seen Amelie as a child in need of a protector.
Years of fierce bombing had made deafness and hearing difficulties common—a casualty of war. Oma’s story to all who asked was that the little girl had been orphaned. The child’s grandmother was a relative of Oma’s from Stelle, who had disappeared during the bombing. How natural for Lea and Friederich Hartman to adopt her.
Rachel knew that, in walking German soil again, the unsettling ghosts of the past were not hers alone. She’d sensed the tension in Jason’s posture, in the grim set of his mouth, in the grip of his hand.
Jason had left Berlin in 1941, having been reassigned to London until the end of the war. He never saw or heard from Dietrich Bonhoeffer again, but learned from colleagues that his friend was arrested in 1943 and charged with conspiracy when his part in the failed plot to assassinate Hitler was discovered. After months of interrogation, and shortly before the end of the war, Dietrich was moved from Buchenwald to Schönberg. The Sunday after Easter, just after leading a service for inmates in his prison cell, Bonhoeffer was taken by Gestapo agents to Flossenbürg. He was hanged at dawn two days later. Among his last known words were, “This is the end—for me the beginning of life.”
Nearly a year after the war, Jason learned through the Red Cross that Curate Bauer had been sentenced to hard labor in Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp on the outskirts of Oranienburg. On Christmas Day, 1942, he’d insisted on taking the place of a young Jew condemned to death for stealing a ration of bread. The curate stood before the firing squad, without blindfold, praying aloud for the soldiers who raised their guns to kill him. The Jewish boy was shot anyway.
So many losses, so much pain.
Rachel didn’t know if she was strong enough to face a Germany with such sadness. At least she’d put the ghost of her father to rest, and she no longer feared the Institute or Gerhardt Schlick.
Six months after the war, a new secretary at the Cold Spring Harbor Institute had mistakenly forwarded a letter to Dr. Kramer’s former address. The letter, to the Institute, from the office of Dr. Verschuer of Berlin, made its way to Rachel. Dr. Verschuer regretted to inform the Institute that Sturmbannführer Gerhardt Schlick had fallen ill during the last month of the war and died in Poland. Miss
Rachel Kramer’s participation in their mutual experiment was no longer of interest.
Incriminating files disappeared near the end of the war; Dr. Verschuer was not tried for war crimes, but continued to conduct research in the related field of genetics. His assistant, Dr. Josef Mengele, better known as the “Angel of Death” for his horrific human experiments at Auschwitz, had escaped to South America in 1949 with the help of his family.
How can we make peace with such a past as this? How can we move into a future, build a home, a family born of so much pain?
But when Jason traced her arm and fingered her wedding ring, Rachel knew.
I am not alone. We are not alone.
Rachel breathed deeply as the train neared the station.
What will Lea think when she sees me? What does she look like now? Do we still look the same?
Rachel sighed, rubbing her stomach, which seemed to grow larger by the day. She knew they no longer looked anything alike, and that might be the greatest hurt of all for her sister.
She turned to Jason and whispered, “Maybe we should have told her before we came. Maybe this is a bad idea.”
Jason pushed his fedora back on his head and whispered in Rachel’s ear, “Did I ever tell you that you don’t look much like that old woman I kissed on her way out of Germany all those years ago?”
“By the time you got around to kissing me, I’d washed that gunk off my face, so you never kissed that old woman,” Rachel countered.
He grinned and sat back.
“This woman’s a lot fatter,” she mumbled, casting what she hoped was an appealing glance his way.
“This woman—this fabulous woman—is carrying our perfect baby.”
“You forget whom you’re talking to—there are no perfect babies.”
He smiled. “Lea will tell you that every baby is perfect, no matter the packaging.”
“She would, wouldn’t she? And Friederich will say each child is rejoiced over with singing,” Rachel remembered.
“And Oma will say, ‘Knit by God in its mother’s womb.’”
Rachel sat back, thankful as their little one kicked, almost on cue.
Yes, she will. I just hope they’ll truly be glad to see us.
But there was no need to wait, to wonder, until they reached the station.
“Look!” Jason pointed out the window of the train. “On the hillside!”
Wildly jumping up and down with a bouquet of Alpine flowers crushed in one hand and waving fiercely with the other arm was a beautiful young woman, flaxen hair splayed round her face in the late-afternoon breeze.
“Kristine! She’s the image of Kristine!” Rachel wept, waving wildly in return.
Beside her was a boy—a young man—who could only be Heinrich Helphman grown up, running, suddenly tugging Amelie along with him toward the station.
As the train slowed and finally lurched to a stop, the whistle blew one long and final blast. Rachel spied Lea and Friederich eagerly searching the windows of the train. Holding hands. They looked a little more mature about the face, perhaps a tad thicker about the waist, but two parts of a lovely whole. Oma leaned forward in a wheeled chair beside them, hands clasped beneath her chin, her face a rapture of joy, of hope and expectation.
Lea’s eyes found Rachel’s and she whooped for joy, pulling Friederich, still limping, with her, closer to the tracks.
Rachel clasped Jason’s hand in both her own and pressed them to her heart.
We’re home. We’re truly home!
Note to Readers
O
N
THE
NIGHT
of May 10, 1933, less than four months after Adolf Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor, members of the SS and the SA (brownshirts), Nazi students, and Hitler Youth trooped into Bebelplatz, a square near Humboldt University in Berlin, where they lit a raging bonfire and sent approximately twenty thousand books up in flames.
In 2009, my daughter and I joined an emotional anniversary ceremony on the very spot. Nearby, a plaque, engraved with a line from Heinrich Heine’s play
Almansor
(1821) reads,
Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen—
“That was only a prelude; where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people.”
I doubt that in 1933 any of those students, so intent on burning books and championing their new Führer, imagined that within a few short years they would be ordered to force Jewish men, women, and children from their homes and ultimately into cattle cars en route to concentration camps, or that they would eventually help load their bodies into crematoriums.
I’ve never understood how one of the most enlightened nations of the world was seduced and reduced to stripping portions of its populace of rights to citizenship and human dignity, to living complicit in the murder of entire groups of people. What made Nazis believe that their wants and needs were most important, that they constituted a superior race, and that anyone their leadership deemed inferior
should be eliminated? Why did the people—and the church, in particular—fail to rise up in protest? And if such a drastic change in culture and behavior happened then, could it happen today? Could it happen in America?
In my quest for answers, I traced the evolution of the pseudoscience of eugenics in the United States and Germany, with its determination to eradicate disease and its design to eliminate certain bloodlines while promoting others, along with Hitler’s fascination with eugenics and his writing of
Mein Kampf
, outlining his intentions. I also explored Hitler’s rise to power, the evolution of the Third Reich, and the events of World War II. I needed to understand how it all began—why any of this madness made sense to those living at that time.
The answers I’ve gleaned are varied and complex, and saddest of all, not altogether a thing of the past. At the most basic level, I believe that fear, greed, arrogance, and the desire to be above others—the cause of so much of the world’s strife—encompassed a nation grasping at straws for a savior, a nation desperate to climb from the pit in which they found themselves after the devastation of World War I and the long-term consequences of the Treaty of Versailles. I also believe much truth can be captured in this familiar saying: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a dissident German pastor, was one of the few who early recognized the danger of Hitler’s absolute power and his insistence on total allegiance to him rather than to any other, including Jesus Christ. Bonhoeffer wrote, “The Church has only one altar, the altar of the Almighty . . . before which all creatures must kneel. . . . He who seeks anything other than this must keep away; he cannot join us in the house of God. . . . The Church has only one pulpit, and from that pulpit faith in God will be preached,
and no other faith, and no other will than the will of God, however well-intentioned.”
Bonhoeffer also realized, after reading
Mein Kampf
, that Hitler was systematically setting about doing exactly what he’d written he would do. He saw the horrific ramifications for Jews in the Nuremberg Laws and the Aryan Clause, which stripped German Jews of their citizenship and rights and eliminated Hebrew Christians from all public and church roles. Historically there were tens of thousands of Hebrew Christians in Germany. Under Hitler’s regime, nearly all were killed in the camps beside their Jewish brethren and many other groups the Reich sought to eliminate.
Bonhoeffer saw the burning of synagogues for the hate crimes they were, saw sterilizations and “mercy killings” of the physically and mentally handicapped as murder; he saw that the church, by not protecting Jews or anyone else outside Hitler’s concept of an Aryan ideal, was not living out Jesus’ commandments. And he realized that with the passing of each of Hitler’s edicts, the German people lost their liberty to protest the madness.