Perhaps it helped her. Taking refuge in the responsibilities of a life that was over. Trying vicariously to impose her attentions on people who were now obliged by government decree to shun them.
Wolfgang had watched her from his place at the piano.
‘Why do you still care about those people, Frieda?’ he asked. ‘Do they care about you?’
‘Wolf, I’m a doctor. I do not require my commitment to be reciprocal.’
Wolfgang smiled, a smile and a shrug.
‘OK,’ he said, ‘fair enough. You’re a better person than any of them but we didn’t need the bloody Nazi Party to know that. I, however, am not and if it was up to me I’d say let them rot.’
In defiance or frustration he began to play some Kurt Weill,
The Ballad of Pirate Jenny
.
‘Wolfgang! Please!’ Frieda said.
He looked up. There was fear on every face.
‘Oh sorry,’ he said bitterly. ‘Not happy with Jew music?’
‘Come on, Wolf,’ Frieda said. ‘The walls aren’t thick and there’s no point provoking them.’
‘That’s what I thought too,’ Wolfgang said. ‘But now I wonder whether it makes any difference.’
‘If we provoke them they’ll kill us,’ Herr Loeb the tobacconist said. ‘We are few and they are many.’
‘They won’t kill us!’ Frau Leibovitz almost pleaded. ‘This is Germany, it’s an aberration, it must be. It
must
be an aberration.’
Some others agreed. This could
not
be real. It was simply unimaginable that the National Socialist Government intended to keep this onslaught up.
Again, the formal description. The
National Socialist Government
. As if somehow, using the Nazi Party’s full name, treating them with formality and politeness, might cause the Nazis to somehow reciprocate.
Other voices took a grimmer view.
‘My son thinks they will keep it up till we are all dead,’ the bookseller Morgenstern observed. ‘He is leaving. He and his fiancée. He has a friend in Zurich who will put them up for a while.’
‘But what will he do? How will he work? Has he a Swiss work permit?’ came the enquiries.
Morgenstern admitted that his son did not.
‘But he’s leaving anyway. He will go on a holiday and then refuse to leave; he says they can shoot him if they wish. His girl agrees. They intend to go within a week.’
This news of course depressed the little gathering further.
Clinging to hope as they were it was terrible to realize that some people had already forsaken it. But everyone knew someone who had already decided the situation was now impossible. The young in particular, those who had least to leave behind, were all making plans to go.
Then the Hirsches, a retired couple from two floors down, arrived with the first edition of the afternoon newspaper. Amongst the crowing lead story reporting the ‘success’ of the ‘spontaneous’ boycott was another headline:
‘Exit Visas Introduced’.
Anybody who wanted to leave Germany had first to get police permission to do so. It was stated that Jews in particular were not simply to be allowed to wander around hostile foreign countries spreading their lies. If they wanted to get out they would have to beg and only then would the authorities take a view.
‘They want to trap us,’ Wolfgang observed and defiantly banged out a few chords of
Mack the Knife
.
Morgenstern asked if he could use the telephone to discuss the news with his son.
Frieda’s parents arrived.
It almost broke Frieda’s heart to see the old man’s face, a combination of suppressed fury and utter confusion that she’d never seen in him before. Only weeks earlier Captain Konstantin Tauber had been an important senior officer in the Berlin Police. He was a decorated war veteran. A deeply conservative German patriot and champion of the rule of law.
Now he was a non-person. Without status, without a job and without rights.
‘The
Sturmabteilung
came to our station yesterday afternoon,’ Tauber explained.
Again, the refuge in formality.
The Sturmabteilung
.
The National Socialist Government
.
Herr
Hitler.
As if somehow they were dealing with something recognizable and relatable to their previous experience of the world. And not an entirely new, completely alien force, more brutal and more primevally cruel and ignorant than anything they could possibly contain within their understanding.
‘Simply marched in,’ Herr Tauber went on. ‘They have been coming and going as they pleased since Herr Hitler became Chancellor but yesterday they came for me. It’s only
weeks
since I was arresting these actual same men for violent disturbances. For intimidation. For all sorts of squalid thuggery. Throwing them into the cells night after night. Now they are in charge! They wanted my desk! They took my cap, my side arm. They told me I was not a good enough German to be a policeman. I was a good enough German to be gassed at Verdun, was I not? To sit for three years in a hole in the ground for the Kaiser?’
Herr Tauber lapsed into silence, accepted a cup of coffee and held his wife’s hand.
‘We came over because we read about the decree regarding Jewish doctors,’ Frau Tauber explained. ‘It’s a terrible thing. To stop you caring for your patients.’
‘From two respected professional people in the family to none,’ Captain Tauber growled.
‘Come off it, Pa,’ Frieda said. ‘You never even wanted me to be a doctor.’
‘That was a long time ago. I changed my view. I’ve been very proud of you. Did I never say?’
‘As a matter of fact, no you didn’t.’
Wolfgang broke the silence that followed this.
‘Cheer up, Pop. You’ve still got a musician in the family.’
Tauber merely glared.
Morgenstern, who had been on the phone to his son, approached Herr Tauber to ask a favour.
‘Excuse me,
Herr Kapitän
,’ he said, ‘but perhaps you still have friends and colleagues at your old station.’
‘Fewer than I might have hoped,’ Tauber said.
‘This business of exit visas, the announcement was only made today. I cannot imagine they could implement it at once.’
‘No, they are not supermen, whatever they might say. Even in these extraordinary times, if they want the border to function as a border they cannot just “will” it, they must have due process.’
‘Would you be kind enough,
Herr Kapitän
, to be so good as to make an enquiry to find out when these exit visas will be required from?’
‘I’ll try,’ Tauber replied. ‘And it’s just “mister” now, I’m not a captain any more.’
Tauber got up, crossed the blue rug and went out into the hallway to the telephone. Frieda watched as he went. His gait stooped at first, the walk of an old and defeated man. After a few steps, though, he seemed to realize it and straightened himself up. Putting back his shoulders and holding his head a little higher.
That’s right, Frieda thought. We must all keep trying to walk upright. It was what Wolfgang told the boys. If you want to feel tall, you have to walk tall.
The phone rang as Herr Tauber reached for it.
‘Stengel residence,’ he said. ‘Tauber speaking.’
After a moment he turned back into the room.
‘It is Herr Fischer,’ he said, ‘of Fischer’s department store. He is enquiring after his daughter Dagmar.’
A Quiet Day at the Store
Berlin, 1933
AFTER THEIR DAUGHTER’S flight from the front of the department store, Herr and Frau Fischer were forced by the SA gang to remain on their knees on the pavement for some ten minutes longer.
Collecting torn shreds of Herr Fischer’s vandalized ‘discount’ banner and licking the paving stones until both of them thought they would choke to death.
‘Some water please,’ Frau Fischer croaked, looking upwards at the boys standing over her, who were young enough to have been her sons.
‘What was that, old sow?’ one laughed. ‘Can’t you speak German? I can’t understand you.’
Frau Fischer’s tongue was swollen up and her mouth was filled with grit and dust. She struggled once more to speak.
‘Water, please, for pity’s sake.’
But there was no pity to be had. Her tormentors would have argued that it was not that they lacked heart or conscience, but simply that Jews did not deserve pity. Their crimes were too terrible and their natures too sly. Heartless cruelty towards such
Untermenschen
was the stern duty of a German patriot.
Only that week in an editorial in the
Völkischer Beobachter
Herr Goebbels had warned
specifically
against the temptation to show pity, reminding decent Germans that such weakness was in fact not just weak foolishness, but treason. The Minister of Propaganda pointed out that the cousins of the poor old Jew granny appealing for help in Berlin were sitting in Washington and Moscow, rubbing their hands together with glee and plotting the annihilation of European civilization.
Therefore Frau Fischer simply could not be shown pity for fear of the global threat her blood posed for Germany.
Which was fortunate for the young men towering over her, because there could be no doubt that tormenting helpless creatures was also the best fun.
It was not pity that brought the Fischers’ ordeal to an end but pragmatism. Word of the scene taking place outside the famous department store had spread to the offices on the Wilhelmstrasse, where there were those who understood that such incidents would not look well abroad. And for the time being at least the new German Government, anxious for its voice to be heard in the world, still considered that to be an issue.
As Frau Fischer was begging for water, a second Mercedes pulled up.
Roaring to a halt behind the splendid empty vehicle that had delivered the proud Fischer family to their fate.
From this second car stepped a man in a gabardine coat and wearing a homburg hat, the inevitable ‘tough guy’ look favoured by the Prussian Political and Intelligence Police, who were shortly to be renamed the
Geheime Staatspolizei
or Gestapo. This gangster-like policeman was followed by another, less stern-looking individual in a lounge suit.
‘You!’ the Gestapo man shouted, flashing his police identification at the SA troop leader.
‘
Heil Hitler!
’ the SA man shouted back, springing to attention and delivering his stiff-armed salute all at the same time.
‘This necessary action is over. Get these two to their feet.’
The SA man looked a little put out at having his sport curtailed. The official police and the SS to whom they were now attached were much resented by the rank and file of the SA, who considered themselves to be the true inheritors of the Nazi revolution. But orders were orders and that was something that could never be ignored. The troop leader therefore swallowed his disappointment and shouted at his men to pull the Fischers to their feet.
‘That man with the camera,’ the Gestapo officer snapped, ‘bring him to me.’
A man in the crowd who had been taking photographs saw himself pointed out and turned on his heel. He was clearly hoping to be able to get away but wisely chose to stop when ordered to and waited while two troopers pushed their way through the crowd in order to escort him back.
Meanwhile Herr Fischer had shaken himself free from the SA men and now approached the Gestapo officer. Despite his ordeal, the bruising on his face and the disarray of his clothing, Isaac Fischer still managed to carry himself with some dignity.
‘My name …’ he said, speaking with great difficulty. His lips were bleeding, his tongue dry and swollen, and like his wife he was in desperate need of water. ‘My name,’ he repeated, ‘is Isaac Fischer.’
‘I know who you are,’ the Gestapo officer replied curtly. ‘Why are you addressing me?’
Herr Fischer was forced to cough and clear his throat several times before attempting another sentence. A function which provoked a look of utter offence and contempt from the policeman.
‘Because,’ Herr Fischer began, his voice like sandpaper on stone, ‘because you clearly have some authority and I wish to make a complaint.’
There was something of a gasp amongst the crowd. Some surprised at the man’s bravery, others shocked at his effrontery. This was followed by much angry murmuring as word of the Jew’s whining spread.
‘A complaint?’ the officer enquired coldly. ‘What have you to complain about?’
Fischer’s eyes widened. It was a shock. Even in his dazed and battered state he had not expected quite such brutal indifference to his obvious plight. And to that of his wife, a middle-aged woman publicly assaulted by a large gang of young men.