The History of History

TWENTY-SEVEN • The Lake of Fire


Margaret awoke the day after she met Philipp. Philipp in his green alligator boots, Philipp with his toy soldier’s gaze—and she was sick with memory.

She did not want to think.

With exhaustion, she heaved herself back toward Regina and the Family Strauss. She knew what she was doing. She was finding a way to think about herself that did not involve herself and, what’s more, involved finer, more gracious people.


She became something like a detective; it was an Indian summer. She looked a second time at the date of the Strauss family’s suicide. She opened a clean notebook, turned to a white page. March 5, 1943, she wrote down in block letters at the top. She double-checked—the date coincided with the so-called Fabrikaktion—the factory action—at the beginning of March 1945, when the Gestapo rounded up Berliner Jews from the factories where they were enslaved. They were forced into cattle cars bound East, the point after which Goebbels declared Berlin judenrein. So the suicide must have been an evasion of deportation, as Margaret had first believed.

She turned to the biographies and journals of Jewish women living in Berlin with non-Jewish husbands.

She suspended her tours and read under the feather bed at home, leaving the house only to buy cans of kidney beans and frozen spinach.

She learned a great deal.

Although officially exempted from deportation, mixed families, who were deprived of all chances of work, were on the verge of starvation in 1943. Jews were denied the papers that would allow them not only to work but also to travel, that would allow rations for meat, dairy, and vegetables. If the non-Jewish spouse did not divorce his spouse, he was in a terrible position. He was called a Rassenschänder—race defiler—usually denied work, denied food, marginalized and isolated as much as, or in some cases even more than, Jews themselves, mobs sometimes being even more enraged by their own kind “gone astray.” Denunciations to the Gestapo were a daily occurrence. Mixed families were hounded by continual visits from the police and random, inexplicable deportations of entire families. Although the non-Jewish half of the couple could easily divorce his spouse, the consequence was grave—the Jewish half would be starved to death or slaughtered. In Berlin at least, this consequence was known full well. So despite the official exemption of mixed families, Margaret began to see very well how the Strausses might have been driven to kill themselves.

But still the question of the children. Why, at least, wasn’t there anywhere to send them? Weren’t there non-Jewish relatives’ homes where the children could be sent, passed off as war orphans, camouflaged? The question would not leave her mind.

Margaret reread her copy of the entry in the police log yet again. This time she focused on the places of birth. Fritz Strauss, born 11/5/06 in Gross-Strenz, and Regina Sara Strauss née Herzberg, born 11/20/09 in Schwedenhöhe.

She began to search. She took out her atlas of Germany. Oddly, neither city was in the index.

She looked at the names again. Perhaps she had misspelled or mis-remembered. But no. She went to the computer. She put Gross-Strenz into Google and found only one reference—on a genealogical page tracing an American family’s origins—to Poland.

All was given away. Both places must be in the eastern realms lost to Germany during the war. Margaret took out a world atlas from 1938 and turned to the pages showing the old Germany. She found Gross-Strenz near Wohlau, a tiny place in lost Silesia, not so far from Breslau, in today’s Poland.

Then she looked for Schwedenhöhe. Today, it seemed, the place was called Szwederowo, in what was once Posen. But in the 1938 atlas, even after looking at Posen until her eyes ached, she found no trace.

She sat back in her desk chair. Half of today’s Poland was once German. This family that with such cunning laid itself into a mute and message-less grave to escape the Nazis—not only were they wiped away without a trace, but both husband and wife came from towns that no longer exist.

From the suicide note of a Jewish wife and mother married to a non-Jewish husband in 1943, Margaret copied the following into her notebook.

Please try to understand me. I am desperate, crushed, without hope. I can’t continue to breathe. I am afraid of the prison walls which await me … Forgive me that I leave you like this. I am powerless … my heart is tearing apart. I am perspiring with fright day and night.



Margaret read this. Her eyes flicked back and forth.

She would return to the Salzburgerstrasse, she decided. If there were a secret door that might crack open and let her approach the Family Strauss, then it would be there.

At the Salzburgerstrasse, she would look for the ghost of Regina Strauss one more time.

Having made up her mind to go, Margaret longed to already be there.


That afternoon, on her way out of the flat, she pushed her hand into the cabinet by the front door, looking for the second key to her bicycle lock. The old one’s shaft had broken off, that cheaply made thing.

So this was how it happened.

As she pushed her hands about in the drawer, she found a little perfume bottle, marked on one side with the word freesia. Margaret’s face darkened. She hoped it would not be raining outside. Where was her umbrella? The days were so dark, with all the clouds.


Over Western Schöneberg a heavy fog was floating. Margaret waited for someone to come out of the outer door at Salzburgerstrasse 8. She sat on the stoop. Her back curved with fatigue, her head she held down, her hands she tucked under her thighs. After a while there was a rain so light that although she could not feel it against her cheeks, the earth around her began to crumble with it.

The time of her life that had belonged to Amadeus was present beside her, coiled like a snake. It flushed her with a certain smell of hopelessness, a piece of moss stuck to a shoe tramped indoors—impropriety and shame. The trouble was this: she felt that the young woman who had loved Amadeus was not she—it was someone else. Or no, not someone else! But it was a character in a play for which she had only memorized the lines, nothing more than a dramatic idea she had had—an idea that she had given power over her tongue for one long, endless summer that went on for years. But it had never been more than an idea. She had been high on love, how could it have been woven into life?

Finally an old woman came out of the house and Margaret caught the door. She stepped into the foyer. The light in the foyer—the soft, rich foyer—was milkier than last time. It was almost melting in the rain. Margaret looked for a long time into the mirrors at her gently doubled and tripled reflections.

She looked for the ghost, she looked for Regina Strauss. But there was no motion in the mirror. The silence was strong; it hurt her ears. She moved her hands to break the stillness. The silence crept.

She went out the back door of the foyer and into the courtyard. She followed the little path that led farther into the greenery. She emerged in the back garden where the goldfish pond nestled in the high grasses, surrounded by tall juniper. All the plants whispered, rustling, given voice by the rain. She looked into the pool and saw the goldfish under the plink-plank of the drops; they were of the darkest orange, like strips of fire.

The rain slowed to a drizzle, and then stopped. The pond was dark, but even with the grey light, here too was a reflection, and Margaret saw a bit of herself shaking in the ripples. And then for a moment, she thought she saw herself, but underneath the fish—deep underneath the fish.

A movement caught her eye. Under the water, there was a white and moving face. Pale, silken hair, and dark, pooling eyes.

The black reflection of the tree branches cut into the woman and seemed to bind her at the bottom of the pond. The flame-like fish swam above her eyes.

Margaret put out her arms and reached down in the water, deep down. She touched the woman’s shoulders. She could feel the collarbone under the cold. Under the skin, the bone was seashell; it cut upward, and the woman’s elastic skin contracted.

Regina Strauss turned her face up to Margaret, her neck dripping back. Her dark pupils widened into rabbit-hole mirrors.

Margaret leaned forward toward the little pond. When she found Regina’s wet arms under the water, she was moved by instinct: she dragged them out into the air, and laid them, dripping, over her own head. She assumed the posture of a supplicant: she knelt and pushed her forehead against the muddy bank.

She bowed down to the water.

She bowed down to Regina.

She prayed to Regina, to the woman who was near.

And then she began to hear a sound, rising out of the water. She put her ear toward it. She heard a moan; she heard the woman’s voice crying out three-dimensionally. She could hear the voice, thick with bubbles, and she submerged her ear to listen as it gradually became intelligible. Regina was speaking quickly.