From Ashes Into Light: A Novel Page 2
First, integrated schooling is no longer allowed; then, by the summer of 1939, we are excluded from the public school system altogether. I often hear other students talking about their plans and hopes for emigration, but I hardly say anything, hardly see anything, hardly think anything. I become a different person, no more the talkative one.
I put a distance between myself and life, as if there were a thick fog washing through me like a dream I wish to forestall, or a recurring nightmare I pray will never begin. I call upon my future to come and reassure me, but nothing happens. I think, maybe things aren’t bad enough yet.
One day I find myself staring at a small hand mirror. My face disappears, and I am lifted out of myself once again.
The Phoenix
East Prussia
Flying at the tail end of a storm, I search for a place in the future to dry my feathers. I find a window ledge under an eave. I have flown through space and time as Phoenix and land, in the fall of 1942, outside Adolf Hitler’s quarters in East Prussia. I look through the window. Hitler screams. Uniformed men run out of the room. The Chief of Staff enters, heading for a large table where Hitler stands over a Soviet map. Because the World War I armistice cut East Prussia off from the rest of Germany with the Polish Corridor, Hitler wants revenge. The Chief of Staff bites the end of his sparse mustache, salutes, and pleads, “Thousands of our soldiers are freezing to death; thousands starve.”
“Bunglers! Idiots! Traitors!” Hitler yells. “All of them! And you too! Get out!”
The war goes on. Murder continues. I have heard and seen such things before.
I look for another place, away from here, and eventually alight outside the consultation room of a German ethics professor. I see quite clearly that this elder is in great danger.
The white-haired professor tells a student, “The writings of Brecht, Mann, Freud, and many others have been publicly burned. Hitler takes no benefit from the eighteenth-century tale regarding Koenigsberg’s world-famous philosopher, Immanuel Kant. Kant is said to have been disturbed from deep contemplation by a neighbor’s crowing cock—so much so he was tempted to end its life, but he did not. As he thought on the subject, he came to the conclusion that the right of every being to exist must be respected.” The student smiles in a way that tells me he is planning a report on the professor for the Gestapo. I open my beak. I call loudly, as a warning, but no one seems to hear. Discouraged, I continue my flight.
In December of 1943 I see a German draftee, the former pastry chef Hans Mai, shelled twice and still on recovery leave from shrapnel wounds. He lightly touches the virgin lying before him on the straw in an East Prussian barn. I fly through the upper doors and perch in the hayloft, tired, in need of rest.
Marta Pulver gazes up at Hans, half adoringly and half apprehensively, as he leans over her. So these are the parents-to-be, I think, and I begin to know more than I wish.
Hans can hardly wait. Slow down, he tells himself. Slow down.
I don’t want to hear his manipulations. Marta is just his type: dark hair, olive skin, long legs, small waist. She looks like a scared deer, but that doesn’t stop Hans from his pursuit.
Hans knows he will be sent to the Russian front as soon as he is declared fit. A man who has been bombed out of his panzer and shot nearly to extinction several times, a man who has seen human organs most people never lay eyes on, he will not deny himself one last, if brief, opportunity to forget the war. A thin-haired blond, pale-eyed, pink-skinned seducer, Hans sings love songs to Marta Pulver. Ardor strengthens his tenor voice.
November chill penetrates. Hans tucks army blankets he requisitioned at the base around Marta. He is willing to overcome any obstacle to achieve his goal. He croons the last song he knows and reaches under the blankets.
“Marta,” he whispers, “I am lost in your black eyes.” She pushes his hands from her sensitive breasts. He implores, “Have mercy. There’s only so much a man can stand.”
“No, Hans, no.”
“No one will ever know. I give you my word.” He tenderly kisses her ear. The fingers of his still bandaged hand massage her shoulder. The other hand creeps towards forbidden parts. The powerful urge to submerge himself is too strong. It doesn’t matter that Marta’s Seventh Day Adventist religion would make her unacceptable if anyone found out. To shut out the war in the arms of a beautiful woman—he can think of nothing else.
I flap my wings furiously. I make a long wailing sound, mournful as a peacock, but what is inevitable is inevitable.
Hans continues his persuasion confidently. He snuggles himself around Marta. She lies inside his embrace so easily she can’t tell where her body ends and his begins. He blows hot breath along her neck. She groans. She presses herself towards him. She hears the moving current of his heart. She follows the beat of his pulse until it becomes her pulse.
For Marta, it is as if Hans is an answer to her prayers, someone strong to free her from the strict household in which she lives. I see images in her mind from the day they met.
When he entered the camera store where Marta works as a photographer and film developer, the salesperson had just stepped out and the store was empty. He picked up a bell from the counter and rang it vigorously.
Marta came to the storefront from the laboratory and saw Hans. He cocked his soldier hat, grinned, and caressed the back of her hand, barely touching, as he paid for his film. This contact had thrilled her through and through, as it thrills her now. “Don’t worry,” he assures her, “nothing will happen. I’m certain.” I tilt my Phoenix head.
* * *
As Marta’s pregnancy is confirmed, sobs and recriminations continue for a time. The womb constricts uncomfortably around the growing baby to be: Elfriede. Grief floods the fetus, and arduous months pass until Elfriede’s parents are safely married.
Hans Mai and Marta Pulver enter matrimony in the town of Wehburg, East Prussia, where Marta’s parents live with six children younger than Marta, eight to nineteen years old. Fritz Pulver, Marta’s father, has been recently persuaded by the townspeople to become the mayor.
On August 10, 1944, Elfriede begins her journey from the womb. Water breaks, no longer suspending her in its soft embrace. Walls squeeze and contract. She twists back and forth. During times of quiet that night, she remembers many things from the past, from the future.
Prussian battles come and go. Screams pierce. A hate-filled soldier’s face grows larger. An army of the maimed hobble by. Hundreds drag themselves along trails that seem to have no end. Flames grow so wide, so tall, they block the sky. The smell of burning sulphur asphyxiates. An infernal landscape belches; foul smelling liquids escape. A charred, desolate loneliness permeates.
The almost-born Elfriede sees bodies in expanding pools of blood. A girl opens her green eyes and breathes one last breath.
* * *
Wind carries me a while longer as the fetus labors toward life: one hand reaches for something unseen; muscles wrench and pull; the struggle nearly dislocates a shoulder. This birth is both painful and ecstatic. Contractions go on and on and on, squeezing and pressing until it seems the baby will never emerge.
The spirit of the unborn Elfriede and I journey across the Atlantic, smelling the medicinal fragrance of mugwort. A mountain wolf lifts his head and emits a low, mournful note. There is chanting inside a cave, and a vision. Again, there is the sensation of flight, the sound of wind and the feeling of lift under my wings.
The spirit of the newborn is with me as I fly back over Wehburg. There, below, is a friendly village where good is still respected, and where the Nazis are occasionally foiled by uncooperative inhabitants.
I see through steep village roofs, through thick brick and heavy castle stone, through silent halls and hidden cellars. I glide over country roads, past coal bins, over chicken coops. Light shines so strong—it emanates from every tree, every building, every person, every object.
Elms stand tall and wide, but their deep roots tremble. I sense the shadows of foreb
oding. Loud sounds from a far distance vibrate the earth unnaturally. Church steeples overlook grasslands laced with cornflowers; yet I know bombs are about to burn the crops, ruin the buildings and barns. For one long moment, an open-armed sky stretches blue in every direction.
The Angerap and Inster rivers sparkle as they meet the Pregel River in the town of Insterburg. Hooves prance over the earth that springs with every step. The Pregel glows like quicksilver and flows westward to the city of Koenigsberg at the eastern mouth of the Gulf of Danzig into the Baltic Sea.
I greet Prussian elk, not yet extinct, the last plentiful home of the white stork and the seldom-seen black stork, sun-speckled forests, and the last remnants of meadow of an unofficial preserve for deer, wolf, and other four-legged creatures alive for now, while the official world around Wehburg occupies itself more and more with war, death, and conflagration.
* * *
The Pulvers live under a cloud of suspicion. The Gestapo heard from someone in a neighboring town that they “keep the Sabbath like Jews.” A family tree is demanded as a mandatory school assignment. Investigations are made. A Gestapo official calls Fritz Pulver to his office and tells him quite calmly, “Without doubt, once the Jews are eliminated, Seventh Day Adventists are next in line.”
Standing in front of the official’s desk, Fritz fights to remain expressionless. He recalls his wife’s entreaty, “Please, please be careful. Do not antagonize the Gestapo. I fear for your life.”
He can’t help it. He won’t keep still. He thinks, what are we coming to? To speak of genocide as one speaks of weeding a field? Today we are declared the enemy. Who will it be tomorrow?
Fritz Pulver holds his hat. He slowly turns the gray rim around in his hands and tries to sound neutral. “What has happened to the Eisen family, please?”
The only local Jewish family and their two girls had vanished last week during the night, and no one can say whether they fled or were deported. The Eisens lived in the next town where the Wehburg children attended school.
“Never mind the Eisen family,” the official replies, “it’s not your business; they weren’t Wehburg residents. As far as we are concerned, you should not even be the mayor of this town. We know you are not a proper German. We are watching you.”
The twenty-five-year-old newly minted official tugs his peach fuzz mustache. He checks a document on his desk inside a black, hardbound folder, then snaps the folder shut. He examines the tall gray-haired man standing before him with a thin smile. The secret police he reports to have encouraged him to scorn this troublemaker and to make him squirm. He leans far back in his chair, clasping his fingers behind his head.
“We know your wife goes to see a Jewish doctor. Don’t think she can fool us because she travels all the way to Insterburg to see him.” His eyes glint dangerously.
Fritz Pulver heads home. Anxious thoughts crowd his mind. Fear crawls up and down his spine. He tries to keep himself from shaking. Holding his shoulders tightly, he jams his fists inside his jacket pockets. So that was why I was summoned, he thinks. I am reprimanded. I am warned. I must tell Dr. Weinberg. He should leave with his family as soon as possible.
That night Anna Pulver sits on a bench in the bedroom. She wears a high-necked flannel nightgown and faces the dresser mirror, removing pins from her long hair and placing them on the dresser. It will be a cold winter, she thinks. Her dark brown hair, threaded with silver, falls through her fingers; it ripples over her shoulders, warming them. She picks up her brush.
“Here. Give it to me,” Fritz says, softly. He touches the bristle to his wife’s hair. As he brushes long, smooth strokes, she leans her head back, stretching her neck.
“We can’t leave just yet,” she tells her husband. “Marta’s still weak and the baby is too young. And how will Marta’s husband ever find us when he is released?”
“Yes,” Mr. Pulver agrees. Hans Mai’s division, sent to the Russian front just before his daughter’s birth, had suffered defeat after defeat. Hans, a prisoner of war, had been shipped to Siberia.
Weeks go by. Gray sky presses down on the church steeple. A harsh cold lies upon Wehburg, whose population doesn’t know what to expect.
Posters, ordered by the East Prussian SS leader, are plastered everywhere: “It is forbidden to leave your land. It is forbidden to travel.” In a last effort by the Nazis, Fritz Pulver receives deportation papers. Townspeople hide him first in one cellar, then another, to save him from Auschwitz.
Herds of wild-eyed cattle from the eastern front trample fields and break fences. Lithuanian refugees trudge through the streets, wearing layers of bulky clothing and carrying the remnants of their possessions in bundles of every shape. The injured and hungry pass by dead-eyed with shock. Anna Pulver approaches a family of four. She urges the refugees to stop and rest, to allow her to wash and wrap their wounds. They look at her with stricken eyes as though they don’t understand. She pushes bread in the hands of the youngest, a girl of ten. She pantomimes chewing motions but without success. The girl stands limp. The father pulls his daughter away by the arm. Driven by a relentless panic, the family presses on.
One afternoon Anna stands next to a leafless apple tree, drying her hands with the apron she wears. She has been searching for the family goat. She watches hordes of frightened people on the road as usual. She whispers to herself, “Oh, dear Lord, they are us, and we are them.”
Early the next morning, the bombing begins. Planes strafe like huge fire-breathing dragons that incinerate the land to ash, burnt sticks, and smelly, coal-like clumps.
Ruth
While the world crashes around me in the violence and chaos of pre-war Vienna, I discover a book, This Salzburg, by Count Ferdinand Czernin, printed in London. Months earlier, papa insisted I have an English tutor, because he wished to follow his younger brother, Franz Gutherz, who’d left for London right after the German takeover.
I stroke the red cover. My fingers trace white letters on the spine. I found the book on a shelf in the room where my parents and I sleep, where my uncle had also stayed for a while before he left. Thank you, Onkel Franz, I think, for making it possible for me to study English.
I lie down on my cot and begin to read.
But the book, which speaks of the beauty and charm of Salzburg, makes me homesick. Maybe if we were to go back to Salzburg where we belong, everything would be the way it was before the Nazis came to power.
The book speaks about how, when one is old enough to understand, what makes life bearable is laughter. I think, I am quite old enough, but it‘s hard to laugh when it is against the law for us Jews to consider ourselves Austrian anymore.
Perhaps because I love to read, or because I want to shut out the anxious atmosphere around me, or perhaps because I hope to be doing something to contribute towards our escape effort, I work at getting through the book with the help of my pocket dictionary. Papa enters the room searching for something in a dresser drawer. He asks, “Ruthi, what are you doing?”
“Studying English. Onkel Franz left this book behind. There is his name inside the cover.”
“Good. Keep it up. Practice makes perfect.” Papa finds what he is looking for and leaves the room. In a rush of enthusiasm, I copy down a Salzburger proclamation, issued in 1916, that looked forward to the end of war in the hopes of establishing a Salzburg festival in the name of Mozart.
I imagine the proclamation was written for our time, that we have been invited back to Salzburg, that we are among those who would find refuge there once again. However, when the author describes Judengasse, a street in Salzburg’s Jewish ghetto, my fantasy fades. I recognize the lane. It still exists. Judengasse is not far from where we lived. Also, Judengasse leads to Getreidegasse, a street of Jewish stores before the Aryanization. I remember a scene that took place on Getreidegasse shortly after the Nazi takeover.
Two men wearing uniforms with swastikas on their sleeves stood in front of a clothing shop warning people away—a sign “Jewish Business” wa
s posted on the display window. I recall papa’s comment, “Salzburgers have long been urged not to buy from Jews, the Gestapo presence only escalates the situation…But this is more than intimidation.”
I continue to read. I learn how, three hundred years ago, Austrian Jew’s used to be one of the archbishop’s main sources of income. As they were not allowed to have any other kinds of businesses, they became moneylenders, but when the people were heavily indebted, they asked the archbishop for help. He drove the Jews out of town and confiscated their property.
I am upset by this. I ask myself, why are people hateful and violent towards each other? Why did the Jews have to wear yellow patches? I want to make such inquiries of papa, but he has gone to those parts of Vienna where arrested Jews have been collected. He hopes to obtain news of Oma and Onkel David.
A fear arises in me. Perhaps things haven’t changed very much from the old times. No, I mustn’t think like that. I squeeze my eyes shut. I won’t read anymore today. Instead, I think of my dear Salzburg and remember a favorite building located on Getreidegasse. I have always adored this building because of the triangle located over the curved arch of the door. The triangle contains a golden eye inside. Underneath, it says: “May God’s eye protect this house and whoever goes both in and out.” I wonder if such an eye could help us. Did it help the people who lived there?
Papa doesn’t come back until late at night. Startled out of sleep, I hear my parents whispering in their bed across the room. I open my eyes. I stay quiet. I hear enough to deduce bad news. “Without food or water, women and children, no toilets, hundreds…and then at the Riding School…” I don’t hear the rest. Softly, papa begins to cry. I don’t sleep for a long time, wondering what happened, what will happen to us.