Authors: Ursula Hegi
Helmut would not even consider that he might have fathered a daughter, and when Hilde would tell him that she’d like to name a girl after his mother, Renate, he would look at her as though she had insulted the Führer and God.
It was the same look that Helmut had given his mother whenever she had refused to write her house over to him, even though he’d explained to her it was the reasonable thing to do: she could stay in the upstairs rooms, where he and Hilde lived now, and they’d move into the five large rooms on the ground floor.
“After all, as a widow you don’t need much space,” he had told her the week after his wedding. “While Hilde and I will have a lot of children.” He was determined to convert the government’s marriage loan into a gift, and eager for Hilde to earn the
Ehrenkreuz der deutschen Mutter.
Already he pictured the bronze cross of honor on her dress, to be replaced, of course, by the silver cross and the gold cross as his family grew.
But his mother didn’t understand. “You are welcome to live upstairs,” she said.
He pointed to the gleaming parquet floor. “You have to admit that the entire house has been cared for much better ever since I married Hilde.”
“I don’t ask your wife to clean for me.”
“She likes to clean.… Why are you so stubborn about the house?”
“I am too old to live like a guest.”
In a few years, he would be the same age as his father had been when he’d died. His father had built this house. Surely, his father would want him to live here like a family man, not a son. He gave his mother a winning smile. “You’re not old.”
But she would not smile back.
Throughout that winter and early spring his mother resisted his efforts. The house should rightfully be his, he believed. But with him she was stingy, while her generosity toward others was known throughout town: not only did she give flowers to neighbors, coins to beggars, but she also was kind to Jews, even though it was plain enough for everyone to see that they were not wanted in Burgdorf, in the entire country. Couldn’t she read the signs on the streets and in the windows of stores and restaurants?
Juden sind hier unerwünscht
—Jews are not wanted here.
Juden haben keinen Zutritt
—Jews are not allowed to enter. Maybe the Jews would finally leave if it became harder to make purchases. Unfortunately, they still could enter some stores, though it was impossible for them to buy rice, coffee, and certain fruits like oranges and lemons.
To deprive Jews only of the necessities of daily life—Helmut agreed with his friends—was far too kind. Besides, some of the store owners, he suspected, were smuggling groceries to Jewish families at night. It was a direct sabotage of the Führer. But Helmut was watching them. Already, he had turned in one of the farmers, who had promptly lost
his vegetable stand in the market, and he was waiting for Frau Weiler to make a mistake.
Helmut would have liked to see more drastic measures to drive the Jews from the country, a repetition of those exhilarating nights of broken glass; but he had to recognize Göhring’s wisdom that it had been a mess, a waste. Those resources belonged to the German people and would be theirs once the Jews were gone.
“You’re impatient,” the pharmacist told him, “and that’s good. We need young men like you to remind us that patience can become a terrible habit.”
Because of his increased political activities, the pharmacist—who still carried the French Jesus around the church square—had curtailed that ritual to the first Friday of every month. Distracted by visions of a different statue—one of his Führer, all in bronze—he enlisted Helmut Eberhardt’s help, and the two went from house to house, cajoling and coercing funds for the monument from even the most reluctant donors. Yet, when the statue of Adolf Hitler was erected in front of the Rathaus, Helmut felt embarrassed. He had pictured it to be at least life size, but it stood no taller than an altar boy, and the pharmacist became very indignant when Helmut asked what had happened to all the money they’d collected. Immediately he tried to apologize for his question while the pharmacist shouted at him that, had he known this would be the thanks he’d get for letting Helmut take part in this glorious project, he would have asked someone more deserving.
Helmut tried his best to educate his mother to the obvious justice in driving the Jews out of the country and reminded her that the Führer had proclaimed Jews inferior to the German race, and that Jews were responsible for all the hardship because they grabbed power everywhere they could, earning better wages than decent Germans.
“The Jews in this country,” she corrected him one Saturday afternoon when he followed her into the garden, lecturing her, “are Germans and far more decent than those—those friends of yours who terrorize them—”
He waved his hands, trying to cut off her words.
“—or those lunatics in uniforms who consider themselves superior.”
Goose bumps sprang up on his chest and arms. It was God’s will
that the Führer was in power, and to him the two had almost become inseparable. “You could be arrested for saying this.”
“But this is between you and me, Helmut.” She crouched to pull weeds from around her Dutch tulips.
“You know it’s my duty to inform on anyone who betrays the Führer.”
“It is your duty—” His mother stood up and brought her face close to his. “—to be one of those decent Germans you like to talk about. And by decent I mean—”
“I know. I know. Jew-loving and old-fashioned and critical of the
Partei.
Don’t you see that each crumb of bread swallowed by a Jew deprives a true German of nourishment?”
She watched him silently, a fine pulse beating in the hollow of her long neck.
A chimney sweep passed the garden door, and a knot of pigeons rose from the coop on the flat roof next door.
“It is a crime.” Helmut made his voice sound forceful.
She had the expression of someone who’d just tasted spoiled meat, and he walked away from her, tired of cautioning her, of correcting her whenever she complained about the government. Once, when she’d joked about the Führer’s mustache—“This thing on his face: it looks like a dirty toothbrush”—it had felt to him as though she’d spit on the holy sacrament. It had been a special day for him, the Führer’s birthday, and he’d brought home a large portrait of his idol in celebration of the occasion.
Throughout the rest of that spring, Helmut became increasingly afraid that one of the neighbors would turn his mother in, and out of that fear grew the idea that it was his obligation to report her. Not that he thought about it constantly, but one evening, when she was doing her weekly mending in the kitchen and wouldn’t even discuss the possibility of signing the house over to him, he realized that—although he couldn’t turn her in for refusing him the house—he could certainly report her for spreading her dangerous ideas. He would be doing his country a service. After all, anyone who supported the Jews postponed the goal of a racially pure country.
He looked at her, bending across the elbow of his sweater. “If you don’t—” He held his breath, frightened and exhilarated as he felt the power between them shift to his side. Deeply, he inhaled, feeling the brown uniform stretch across his chest. “If you don’t give me the
house, I’ll turn you in for the things you’ve been saying.” He heard his words and waited for her to acknowledge that something significant had changed between them, irreversibly, and he was prepared to console and uphold her through that transformation. He felt willing to forget every outrageous word she’d said—if only she crumbled.
But she kept pulling the needle though the knitted fabric, again and again, and when she finally spoke, she merely told him to go upstairs where he slept with his wife in the room of his childhood. “Go to sleep,” she said as though he were not a family man but still a little boy.
Her obvious lack of fear and respect convinced Helmut that he should have reported her long ago. Just because she was his mother should not make her immune. What a risk he had taken, listening to her inflammatory comments about the Führer and the
Partei.
It would be good for her to contemplate her attitude while locked up. By the time she came back—
If she comes back
… He pushed it away, that voice, after the first delirious pang of relief. To be free forever of her disappointment and her love, free of her concern and her carelessness.
If she comes back …
No, they wouldn’t hold her for long. But what if they did? He simply had to teach her a lesson. Once he and Hilde were established in his mother’s rooms, she’d be grateful to live upstairs.
Renate Eberhardt did not believe her son would turn her in until that Tuesday in June of 1939 when Emil Hesping’s car screeched to a stop in front of her house and he ran inside to warn her that she was about to be picked up. Within minutes after Renate refused his offer to take her to his uncle’s apartment in Krefeld, Trudi heard the news, and when she reached the white stucco house, her heart beating high in her chest, two of the Eberhardts’ neighbor women were already urging Renate to pack her things. They were watching the street, prepared to bolt from the backdoor as soon as the Gestapo drove up.
“Often people don’t come back,” one of them said, correcting herself quickly, “at least not for a while,” and the other advised, “Better to have some belongings.”
“You still have time to hide somewhere,” Trudi implored Frau Eberhardt. “Herr Hesping, he wants to help.”
“A bedroll.” The other neighbor waved away the flies that buzzed through the kitchen. “She needs a bedroll.”
“A change of clothing.”
“Don’t forget soap.”
“And food.”
“Yes, food. Something that will keep.”
“A needle and thread.”
“Slippers. Slippers are important.”
“And a towel.”
“Oh… I don’t need anything.” Renate Eberhardt spoke and moved slowly as though the air around her had thickened like pine honey. Her face had the serene look of the very old, who have forgotten much of their lives, except for a few childhood incidents, and are puzzled to discover all of a sudden that they no longer are young.
“You can bring everything home again.”
“You can hide in my house,” Trudi whispered to her.
Renate Eberhardt shook her head. She walked to the open back window and looked out into her abundant garden. Her thick braids were secured in a double rope in back of her slim neck—a style she’d worn on many occasions but which, now, seemed so ominous to Trudi that she wanted to loosen the graying hair, brush it for Renate, and make her wear it loose, perhaps, a curtain, a refuge.
“They’ll find me,” Renate said as though she had resigned herself.
“Don’t say that.”
“Yes, don’t say that, Renate.”
“It’s important to keep up your hope.”
“Be glad you’re not Jewish.”
“If you were Jewish, I’d be much more worried about you.”
“You’ll be grateful to have a change of underwear.”
“And a cardigan.”
“What I take won’t matter.” But she did not object when her neighbors packed for her.
They knew of people who’d been taken away, and they had given much consideration—though they assured themselves it would never happen to them—to what they would bring in case they were arrested. Those nights when sleep evaded them because they’d heard of yet another disappearance, they would recite their lists to themselves, revise them, make sure most items served at least two purposes, and fret over what to leave behind. Because that was by far the hardest part—to decide what to leave behind.
They had seen how the Nazis weakened the community by coming
for people at all hours of the night, hauling them from their homes, punishing conspiracy, making examples out of those who tried to help others. Since laws no longer offered protection, they’d learned to look out for their own survival. And part of surviving was to remind themselves of the differences between themselves and those who had been taken away.
At least they were not Jewish.
At least they’d never said anything against the Führer—not openly, that is.
At least they hadn’t refused to return Anton Immers’ crisp
Heil Hitler
when they’d walked into his store to have an order of
Blutwurst
—blood sausage—say, or
Sülze
—head cheese—weighed and packed in brown paper, and had found themselves face to face with the framed pictures of the Führer, the butcher, and the saint, the three sets of eyes boring through them and any other obstacle with the certainty of victory.
The neighbor women were grateful that their own children were not like Helmut Eberhardt, and they pitied his mother—not only for being betrayed by her son, but also for not having other children who’d certainly offset that guilt they were sure she must feel for having failed at motherhood.
They coaxed and hurried Renate Eberhardt into several layers of underwear and dresses, closing buttons and tying ribbons for her while she stood with her arms away from her body like an obedient child. Once, when they heard steps in the rooms above, they glanced at each other with alarm and then at her with pity.
“It’s only his wife,” Frau Eberhardt said as though she could not bring herself to speak her son’s name.
I hope Helmut dies, Trudi thought. I hope he dies. “Come with me,” she pleaded. “I’ll get you out of town. There are others who’ll be glad to help too.”
Frau Eberhardt shook her head, and the neighbor women cleared the vase with wild flowers and the napkin rings from the table, arguing in whispers as they laid out on the wooden surface what she was to bring with her: flatware, a cup and bowl, slippers, a nightgown, five cakes of soap, stockings, two needles and thread, a toothbrush and toothpaste, a washcloth and a towel, a pencil and a notepad. They decided Renate’s raincoat could double as a bathrobe, and they stitched money and small pieces of jewelry into its hem.
When they searched for a sleeping bag and couldn’t find one, Trudi opened the sewing machine, tears of rage blurring her vision as she stood there, her right foot pumping while the needle raced through the two blankets that she stitched together, and with each jab of the needle she wished it would go straight through Helmut’s heart. When the blanket bag was finished, the neighbor women rolled a pillow and the other items inside, securing everything with a leather belt that matched one of Renate’s dresses while serving as a carrying handle.