I tossed the hat back on the pile, pleased with the compliment. Though my shoulder-length hair was not white blond, many would have considered it honey gold in the right light, a good thing, since every German girl wanted blond hair, and the use of peroxide was discouraged.
We passed a mound of canvases and framed pictures. A painting of two men embracing lay on top, the canvas spiked through on a spear from a sculpture below.
“My God, Jew art,” Mutti said. “Can’t they just hang a calendar on the wall like the rest of us?”
On his way home from the pharmacy, Father joined us there by the piles. The creases on his face looked deeper that day. A rough night on the sofa.
I lifted a scrapbook from a table and flipped through the pages, past black-and-white photographs of someone’s beach vacation.
“This is undignified,” Father said. “You two call yourselves Christians?”
Of course he disapproved. Why had he even stopped to speak with us? I tossed the scrapbook on our pile.
“Anton, can you not relax a bit?” Mutti said.
I pulled a painting, one of two of grazing cows, out from under a crush of framed canvases. It was well done, perhaps even a masterwork. Traditional German art. Just what the Propaganda Ministry found suitable, and something every cultured woman should own.
“What do you think, Mutti?”
Mutti pointed at the cows and laughed. “Oh, it’s you, Kleine Kuh.”
Kleine Kuh was Mutti’s nickname for me. Little heifer. As a child she’d had a brown cow that I reminded her of. I had long ago dealt with not being as dainty and blond as my mother, but the name still rankled.
“Don’t call Herta that,” Father said. “No girl should be called a cow.”
It was good to have Father’s support, even if he was a lawbreaker who listened to foreign broadcasts and read every foreign newspaper he could lay hands on. I took the two paintings and set them in our pile.
“Where have the owners of all this gone?” I asked, though I had a general idea.
“To the KZ, I suppose,” Mutti said. “It’s their own fault. They could have stepped aside. Gone to England. They don’t work; that is the problem.”
“Jews have jobs,” Father said.
“Ja, of course, but what jobs? Lawyers? That is not really work. They own the factories, but do they do the work? No. I’d rather do ten jobs than work for them.”
Mutti pulled a dressing gown from the pile and held it up. “Would this fit you, Anton?” Father and I didn’t have to see the silver K on the sleeve to know who the former owner was.
“No, thank you,” he said, and Mutti walked off, scouting the piles.
“Are you sure, Father?” I took the dressing gown and held it out to him. “It’s a nice one.”
He took a step back. “What has happened to you, Herta? Where is my girl with the tender heart, always first to take up the collection can for the neediest? Katz was a man you could have learned from.”
“I haven’t changed.” It was obvious he didn’t support or even like me much, but did he have to broadcast this?
“Katz was compassionate. A doctor without love is like a mechanic.”
“Of course I’m compassionate. Do you know what it’s like to be able to change a person’s life just with these hands?”
“You’ll never be a surgeon with Hitler around. Can’t you see that? Your generation is so pigheaded.”
Much as I hated to admit it, he was right about the surgeon part. As one of a handful of women in my medical school, I’d been lucky to be able to study dermatology, never mind surgery, and had received only basic surgical training.
“We all must sacrifice, but Germany’s changing thanks to my generation. Such poverty yours left us with.”
“Hitler will be the death of all of us, just taking what he wants—”
“Quiet, Father,” I said. How dangerous for him to respond in such a way in public. He even told jokes about Party leaders. “Hitler is our hope. In no time, he’s gotten rid of the slums. And he must take. Germany can’t thrive without room to expand. No one will just give back the land we’ve lost.”
Many parents had grown wary of confronting their children for fear of being denounced by them, but not my father.
“He’s killing Germany to feed his own vanity.”
“This war will be over within weeks. You’ll see,” I said.
He turned with a dismissive wave.
“Go straight home and rest before afternoon coffee, Father.”
He walked away, barely avoiding a passing tram. Father would need a nap. The cancer was having a party in his body. Could Katz have helped him live? It was no good wasting time with such thoughts. I busied myself searching the piles for medical books.
Mutti hurried to me. “I found rose-scented soap…and a toaster.”
“Don’t you worry about Father, Mutti? He’s going to be denounced. I can feel it.”
Though my parents were both products of German blood and could trace their pure German ancestry back to 1750, my father could not hide his lack of enthusiasm for the Party. He still put his traditional striped German flag in our front window next to Mutti’s new red Party one, though Mutti was always moving his to a side window. No one noticed it in the sea of swastikaed flags hung outside every building, but it was only a matter of time before someone turned him in.
“Ja, feind hirt mitt, Herta,” Mutti said. The enemy is listening.
She pulled me closer. “Don’t worry about that, Kleine Kuh. Focus on work.”
“I’m allowed only dermatology—”
Mutti pressed her fingers into my forearm. “Stop it. You’ll be working with the best and brightest soon. You can go all the way.”
“Someone needs to rein Father in.”
Mutti turned away. “What will people say if we have these things in our home?” she said, shaking her head at the toaster in her hand.
We paid for the items we’d chosen: the toaster, the scrapbook, the paintings, and a mink stole with the glass-eyed heads still attached, a luxury item Mutti was willing to risk lice for. The soldiers threw in a doctor’s framed diploma Mutti said she’d use to display her Aryan blood certificate and some canvas running shoes for me. All for only ten marks. We seldom had bread to toast, and Mutti could not afford to go anywhere she could wear such a mink, but the smile on her face made it all worthwhile.
—
I WAS HAPPY TO HAVE those new running shoes for a sleepaway trip I was chaperoning the next week at Camp Blossom, a camp situated in a pine forest half a day’s train ride north of Düsseldorf. It was run by the Belief and Beauty Society, which was affiliated with the BDM, the Bund Deutscher M?del or the League of German Girls, the female wing of the Nazi Party youth movement. The Belief and Beauty Society was for older girls only, to prepare them for domestic life and motherhood. This sleepaway trip was intended to transition the younger ones into the organization, and my job as unit leader was to look after the girls in my cabin—not an easy job.
Unit leaders received day assignments, and I was sent to the craft hut, a blatant mismatch, since I considered painting amateurish watercolors and weaving gimp lanyards a complete waste of time. Plus, my considerable talents lay outside the art world. With my extensive medical training, I should have been running the camp health clinic, but one serves where one is needed. At least the hut looked out over the lake, which reflected the reds and oranges of the trees surrounding it.
Pippi, another girl assigned to work the craft hut, joined me there one afternoon. I’d known Pippi since we’d both joined BDM, and though she was a few years younger than I, we were good friends, well on our way to being best friends, something every other girl seemed to have. Pippi and I had done everything in BDM together. Earned our badges and leadership cords. Taken turns carrying the flag in at meetings. At the camp we shared meals and even tidied up the worktables in the craft hut together.
“Let’s hurry,” I said. “It’s about to rain.”
Pippi took the scissors from the tables and plunked them into the metal cans around the room. She was terribly slow about it.