Page 84 of Hell to Pay
“Nope,” Sebastian said good-naturedly. “But I’ll tell him what game it’s from.”
“As long as you won it,” Ashleigh said.
“Dude,” Ben said, sounding pained.
So, yes, we did an interview that afternoon. Ashleigh was as excited as a squirrel who’d just found her missing cache of nuts, and told the interviewer that she was going back to school to become a documentary filmmaker. I wondered whether her parents knew about this. Alix expressed her love for her grandfather and me and talked about how much the trip had meant to her—I teared up a bit at that, which the reporter seemed excited about—and I wore my Chanel suit and tried not to look old.
I’m fairly sure I was the least successful of us.
Never mind, though, because at eleven the next morning, we were all—the five of us, the museum authorities, and the TV crew—going to descend into the bowels of the palace again to find the tiara. That would be Tuesday, and Friday night was the opera. On Saturday, we left for home. Without the tiara, of course, as it would be held in escrow, but we’d know we were on our way to retrieving it.
Perfect, you see.
Pity I’d be wearing the ugly shoes for my big moment on screen. Vanity, it seems, is the last thing to die.
37
THINGS YOU SAY ON CAMERA
What a party we were, standing in the entrance hall of the palace! The five of us, with Ashleigh for once not holding her phone out in front of her, because the TV people had agreed to let her use their footage. Also the glamorous blonde TV reporter and less glamorous cameraman from yesterday; Dr. Bauer, the curator; and the entire museum board this time, all seven of them. I’d compromised and worn the Chanel suit and pearls along with the ugly shoes, and had asked the cameraman not to film my feet. Of course, that likely meant he would do so, probably on my halting way down the winding stair; something about the pathos of old age. Personally, I preferred the Chanel-suit image of myself.
We went through the whole story again—in English, for the benefit of my party; subtitles would be used when the program aired—the bombings, then my escape with the Beckers. Too slowly for Alix’s taste, as she kept muttering, “Hurry it up.” Alix, I fear, has inherited all my impulsivity and impatience; she certainly didn’t get it from Joe. The board members and the reporter wanted to stand in the morning room, though, and hear more about our life toward the end ofthe war, perhaps as a teaser—I’d learned that word from Ashleigh—before the great unveiling, and I was happy to oblige. Why had I agreed to Ashleigh’s interviews in the first place if not to tell this story?
So I stood in our beautiful room and told how I had first heard here of the destruction ofKristallnachtandthe burning to the ground of the Semper synagogue. “The bill for the clearance of the wreckage,” I said, “was given to the Jewish community. Think of that: they had topayfor the destruction of their sacred building. The firefighters who could have saved it were prevented by the Nazis from doing so, and it burned to the ground. And here I have another tale to tell, one more example of decency by a small person, a powerless person. A man named Alfred Neugebauer was one of the firefighters. A few days afterKristallnacht,his colleagues brought a large Star of David, salvaged from the synagogue, to the fire station as a trophy. When nobody was watching, Herr Neugebauer hid the star, which was not small! Twenty-seven inches in diameter, imagine—not something one could put under a coat. He took it and hid it in a carpenter’s shop near his home, and there it stayed throughout the war. And in 1949, he returned it to the surviving Jewish community in Dresden. A mere handful of them it was, but imagine what that return must have meant to them. Imagine his compassion, and his courage.”
I described, too, my father’s distress the next day. “After all,” I said, “the Jewish citizens of Saxony were his subjects too. He was their ruler in name only now, of course, but he’d been brought up to honor that duty, and he felt his responsibility. Should he have said more at the time? No doubt he should have. I feel sure that the shame of his failure influenced him later, when he didact.”
The camera lingered on my parents’ wedding photo, which the reporter asked me to hold up—wanting the imageof my age-spotted hands, probably—and I explained Father’s heroics in the Great War and his terrible injuries, how my beautiful mother had trusted and relied on him, and how she’d died cradled in his arms. I spoke finally of my father’s summons to Gestapo headquarters for his activities, and how the bombing that killed my parents may have saved them from a worse death.
“Although such a thing would never have crossed my father’s mind,” I said. “To have twenty-five thousand of his people die, so he himself could be spared torture and execution? Never. Even to have my mother and me escape a concentration camp—no, he wouldn’t have made that bargain. But I know, because my mother wrote it in the final seconds before she died, that their last wish was that I might escape.” I held out something else, then—my mother’s housekeeping notebook, with her final letter to me. “I carried this across Germany for months. As heavy as my rucksack felt at times, I’d never have left it behind. And I’ve carried it in my heart ever since. I wasn’t fortunate because I was born a princess. I was fortunate because I was born to these people, with their decency, their deeply felt sense of honor.” And, yes, I choked up at this point. “Because you see in this letter, too, and in my father’s last words to me, that they didn’t just urge me to run. They wanted me to help save the Beckers. Dr. Becker, who was such a good man, such a dedicated doctor, and his children, who had done nothing—nothing, any of them!—to harm the Reich, and yet had been sentenced to die. The things my father hated most? Injustice and cruelty to those weaker than oneself, and what was Hitler, what was the Nazi regime, but the embodiment of injustice and cruelty?”
“Wonderful,” the reporter said when I finished—insincerely, I was sure, for I very much doubted the German citizenry wanted any more lectures, and I was also sure that mine would be cut out of the broadcast. “And now, if you would …”
She’d asked me to go down to the kitchen again, and to the cellar beneath, but I’d refused. I didn’t want to look at those brick walls, or at the corner where all those people I’d loved had pressed together and died in a heap. I didn’t want to see myself wrestling the coat off poor one-legged Franz, or to see Dr. Becker putting his shoes onto my father’s feet so he wouldn’t have to think himself a thief. Not that those images will ever leave my mind. They’ve been engraved there for too many years for that. But I couldn’t share them again, not like this.
Bad enough to walk down the Long Corridor, the armaments collection filling the cases on either side, and remember how I’d hurried to keep up with Father, how comforted I’d been even then by his presence. To open the secret doorway to the winding stair and make my cautious way down it again, and remember it filled with choking smoke, and Father coughing. How his scarred lungs had protested this final effort, and how determined he’d been to make that effort anyway.
Somebody had fixed the lights since we’d been in here, and I could see around me as I never had before. Decades’ or perhaps centuries’ worth of dust and grit on the stairs, cobwebs drifting along high ceilings of rough stone, and the immensity of the outer room with the rat-chewed remains of the pallets. The children’s pajamas, my teddy bear. And the pile of yellow stars.
Jude.
I held them up, and when my voice shook this time, it was from rage. “This,” I said, looking straight into the camera. “This is what happens when a country, a people, turn their back—ourback—on decency.Thisis what happens. Millions of Jews, and so many others, too, suffered and died in the camps. Two million Poles. Three million Russian prisoners of war. Hundreds of thousands of Roma. Homosexuals.Intellectuals. The disabled. Aristocrats. Priests. Children.Babies.I know it’s easy now to say, ‘That was wrong.’ What I can’t forgive is this: It should have been easythen.Oh, I understand how hard it was not to go along. I understand how privileged I was myself, and you may well say that I have no right to condemn those who were hungry, who were jobless, who were hopeless. I understand the fear of reprisal and the desire to fit in, to partake of the brave new world that was waiting for theHerrenvolk,the Master Race. That’s what I can’t forgive, though—theembrace.The German people weren’t dragged into this. Most of us went along willingly. Happily, or just unthinkingly. Perhaps any people who had suffered as Germany had, who had been so humiliated and impoverished after losing a war—a people who prided themselves on their military prowess!—and who were now offered hope of redemption by a strong leader, would have done the same, but—no, even from my own people, even from myself, I cannot forgive that. Germany thought of itself as cultured. Hitler definitely thought of himself that way, with his artistic pretensions, and so did Dr. Goebbels, who studied literature and history and aspired to be an author, yet they engineered a barbarism worse than that of any heathen conqueror. I can say, ‘I was only a child. I didn’t know,’ but it happened, it was monstrous, and I must bear my part of the shame.”
It was time to open the final secret door, I knew, time to explain the secret of the cistern. But not now. Not yet. I said, “I’m sure you will edit this part out of the story—all of this I’ve said here, in fact—but I must finish it anyway. It is my duty.”
“Perhaps you’d prefer to wait until after the tiara,” the reporter said.
I fixed her with my best cobra stare. That, perhaps, is my true legacy from my father. You may call it arrogance.Imperiousness. I like to think of it as the courage of my convictions, but I may be overestimating myself. Such is human nature.
“No,” I said. “Now.”
This time, I wasn’t going to have Alix read. This time, I would read Joe’s letter myself. My voice might quaver, but I was doing exactly what Joe would have wanted. My beloved husband could no longer speak for himself, but he didn’t need to, because I was still here to do it.
What do we live for, after all, except to carry on the best parts of those we’ve loved? What is our life but their legacy, and what is our duty but to try to live up to that legacy, to add to it, and to pass it on to those who come after us?
If we cannot learn, if we cannot grow, what do we become? We are better than that. We aremorethan that. My father had never said, “Such-and-such is too hard. It is too much to ask. I cannot do it.” Joe had never said it, either, and I wanted these people to know that. So I stood there among the moldy straw, among the rats, and read Joe’s next letter.
May 1, 1945
