“Please forgive me, Professor. I didn’t recognize you.”
“It’s you, Miss Adler!” And as he says this, he peers at Dita with his myopic eyes. “But are you crying?”
“It’s the cold. It’s irritating my eyes, dammit!” she answers sharply.
“Is there anything I can do for you?”
“No, nobody can.”
The professor puts his hands on his hips.
“Are you sure?”
“I can’t explain. It’s a secret.”
“Then don’t tell me. Secrets are for keeping.”
The professor bows and marches off to his hut without another word. Dita feels even more bewildered than she was before. Maybe it’s her fault. Maybe he’s right, and she shouldn’t stick her nose into other people’s business. She wants to talk with someone; she thinks of Miriam Edelstein. She’s the only one who visits Hirsch outside regular hours.
Dita finds Miriam with her son, Arieh, inside Barrack 28. There’s not much time left before curfew. It’s not the best time for visits, but when the deputy director sees Dita’s distress, she can’t bring herself to say no.
The darkness and the cold don’t lend themselves to long conversations, but Dita tells her everything from the beginning: Mengele’s warning, how she accidentally witnessed Hirsch’s first encounter with a particular individual, her doubts, and her attempts to resolve them by finding out the truth. Miriam listens without interrupting her, with no sign of surprise when Dita tells her about Hirsch’s secret affairs with other men. She even remains silent for a while after Dita has finished her tale.
“So?” asks Dita impatiently.
“You’ve got your truth now,” Miriam replies. “You’ll be satisfied.”
“What do you mean?”
“You wanted truth, but a truth that suited you. You wanted Fredy Hirsch to be a brave, efficient, incorruptible, charming, flawless man … and you feel cheated because he’s a homosexual. You could have chosen to be happy at the confirmation that he’s not an SS informer, that he really is one of us, and one of the best. But instead, you feel offended because he’s not exactly what you’d like him to be.”
“No, don’t misjudge me. Of course I’m relieved that he’s not one of them. It’s just that … I couldn’t imagine him being that way!”
“Edita, you talk about this as if it were a crime. The only thing that’s different is that instead of being attracted to women, he likes men. It’s no crime.”
“In school, they told us it was an illness.”
“The real disease is intolerance.”
They stop talking for a moment.
“You already knew, didn’t you, Mrs. Edelstein?”
The woman nods.
“Please call me Miriam. We share a secret now. But it’s not our secret, so we have no right to reveal it.”
“You know Fredy well, don’t you?”
“He’s told me some things and then I’ve found out others.…”
“Who is Fredy Hirsch?”
Miriam gestures that the two of them should walk around the hut. Her feet are freezing.
“Fredy Hirsch’s father died when he was very young. He felt lost. And then they signed him up for the JPD, the German organization that gathered together young Jews at that time. He grew up there and found a home. And sport was everything to him. The organization quickly realized that he had talent as a coach and an event organizer.”
Dita links arms with Miriam Edelstein to try and stay warm as they walk. Miriam’s words blend with the sound of their clogs stamping on the night frost.
“His reputation as a JPD coach grew. But the rise of the Nazi party ruined everything. Fredy told me that Adolf Hitler’s supporters were a bunch of mean-spirited barroom troublemakers who used to defy the laws of the German Republic. Later, they were the ones who started to make laws to suit their own purposes.”
Hirsch told Miriam he’d never be able to forget the afternoon he arrived at JPD headquarters and was confronted by the words traitor Jews painted on one of the walls. He wondered what they had betrayed and couldn’t come up with an answer. Some afternoons, stones would hit the windowpanes during a pottery workshop or while the choir was rehearsing. Each blow against the glass shattered something inside Fredy.
One afternoon, his mother asked him to come home straight from school because they had to discuss something important. Fredy had matters to attend to, but he accepted his mother’s request because one of the JPD teachings he had absorbed was to respect hierarchies and ranks zealously.
When he got home, he found the family gathered, somber. His mother informed them that their stepfather had lost his job because he was a Jew, and the situation was becoming dangerous. They had decided to leave for South America—Bolivia—to start over.
“Go to Bolivia? You mean run away!” Fredy replied harshly.
His stepfather started to stand up to confront him, but it was Fredy’s older brother, Paul, who told Fredy to shut up.
Fredy walked out of the house, stunned. Bewilderment and force of habit led him to the only place where everything was orderly and coherent—JPD headquarters. It was there he found one of the directors checking the water bottles before the next excursion. Normally, Hirsch didn’t talk about personal matters, but he couldn’t bear the cowardice of running away.
The coordinator of outdoor activities, whose blond hair was starting to turn white, had watched Fredy grow up in the JPD. He looked at Fredy long and hard, and told him that if he wanted to stay, there’d be a place for him in the JPD.
Fredy was only seventeen, but he already possessed self-confidence. His family left, and he was on his own. Although not entirely: He had the JPD. In 1935 they sent him to the Düsseldorf branch as a youth instructor. He told Miriam that initially he was euphoric over his new job in such a vibrant city, but his euphoria rapidly disappeared in the face of the hostility shown to the Jews. They stopped fixing the windows at the JPD headquarters because the stone-throwing became a daily event. Insults were hurled at them from the street, and each day saw a drop in the number of children who attended. Some mornings, his basketball team consisted of a single player.
One afternoon, from an upstairs window, Fredy spotted someone painting a yellow X on the large wooden entrance to the building. He raced down the stairs. The boy with the paintbrush looked at him mockingly and went on painting, unconcerned. Fredy grabbed him by the shirtfront so forcefully that he dropped his can of paint.
“Why are you doing this?” asked Fredy, taking in the swastika armband with a mix of bewilderment and anger at what was happening in his own country.
“You Jews are a danger to civilization,” yelled the adolescent disdainfully.