The Runaway Family (12 page)

He walked on, past the synagogue, which, he noticed, had new doors, not the ornately carved ones he had always loved and admired, but plain, untreated timber on utilitarian black hinges. His step hastened as he passed familiar shops, some with boarded-up windows, to the corner where his own shop was… had been. He stared in horror at what he saw. It, too, was boarded up, but not just the window, the door as well, a haphazard criss-cross of planks nailed into a blackened doorframe. Dark swathes of soot streaked the walls, and the blackened frames of the upstairs windows gaped to the open air. For a long, disbelieving moment, Kurt stood quite still, staring at the ruin of his home. Terror clutched his heart, a physical pain. Ruth! Where’s Ruth? The children? Were they there when the fire broke out? Are they safe? Did this happen the night of his arrest, or later on? Where are they now?

Turning his back on the burnt-out blackened shell of his home, he rushed into the Meyers’ bakery on the other side of the street. Leah Meyer was behind the counter as he crashed through the door. She looked up, fear leaping in her eyes, to see who had burst in so violently. The fear turned to astonishment and then pleasure as despite his scarecrow appearance, hollow cheeks and shaved head, she recognised him.

“Herr Friedman!” she cried. “You’re back! God be praised! You’re home.” She hurried round from behind the counter to clasp his hand and pump it up and down.

“Where’s my family?” demanded Kurt. “Are they safe? What happened?”

“Yes, yes,” she assured him. “Don’t worry! They’re safe. They escaped the fire. Your wife took them to your brother. They are living with him.”

Kurt sank onto the chair beside the counter, suddenly exhausted. “Thank God!” he murmured. “Thank God for that.” He gave Frau Meyer a weak smile. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. What happened? What happened to the shop? How did it catch fire?”

At that moment Leo Meyer came into the shop from the bakery behind. When he saw Kurt sitting by the counter he rushed over to him, clapping him on the shoulder. “You’ve come back, Kurt. Thank God you’re safe.” He turned to his wife.

“Put up the shutters, Leah. Let’s close up.” He turned back to Kurt. “We don’t stay open after dark anymore, it isn’t safe. It’s bad enough in the daytime. You’ll stay with us for the night, eh? Before you go to Munich to find them?”

He helped his wife put sturdy wooden shutters in place across the window. “Protects the glass from stray bricks,” he explained as he slid the metal bar into its socket and snapped the padlock closed. “Wouldn’t stop anyone determined to break in, but it slows them down.”

Once the shop was secured, the Meyers led the way up the stairs, to the apartment above.

“I expect you’re hungry,” Frau Meyer said, and without waiting for Kurt to admit it, went into the kitchen to prepare some food. She had taken in his emaciated face and the way his clothes hung off his body.

“Tell me what happened,” Kurt said to her husband as he sat down. Leo took out a cigarette case and passed it over to Kurt, before taking a cigarette himself and lighting both.

“It was the night of the riot, the night you were arrested,” he said. “You saw the mob, the frenzy they were in.” Leo shuddered at the recollection of that night. “We were lucky that night, we only had our windows broken. We locked ourselves into the bakery, or they would probably have arrested me too.” Leo inhaled deeply on his cigarette, letting the smoke fill his lungs. “Well, when the SS took you away, the mob set fire to your shop. They’d already tried to burn the synagogue, and they got the taste for fire. They weren’t people anymore, not people, just one huge howling beast. Your shop was there, it belonged to a Jew and so they set it on fire.”

“But Ruth? The children? You said they were all right. They weren’t hurt? They got out in time?”

“Thanks to the courage of your wife,” Leo replied, “they all got out. But it was close. She managed to lower them down from the upstairs window. She had to jump herself. She sprained her ankle, but amazingly that was all.” Leo drew hard on his cigarette. “She is a brave woman, your Ruth.”

Over the meal that Leah had prepared, the Meyers told Kurt how Ruth had found the deed box; how she’d been attacked by the Hitler Youth; how she’d refused to burden the Meyers any longer.

“She was determined to take them to your brother,” said Leah. “She wouldn’t stay with us any longer. She did write though, just once to say they’d arrived.”

“It’s where I told her to go if necessary,” Kurt said, “but I didn’t really think she’d have to.” He looked across the table at his neighbours, a couple he had known for years, but with whom he had never been close. “Thank you,” he said simply. “Thank you for all you did.”

Leah raised her hands. “Who would not?”

“She was right to go,” Leo told him. “No one’s safe round here. Oh, we try and get on with our daily lives, but it is more and more difficult. Our shops are continual targets for the Hitler Youth and as soon as we make repairs they come by again. Several of the local children have been beaten up by these gangs, and there’s no redress, no justice. Parents are keeping them indoors now. Since the new laws, we have no status.”

“For the first time in my life, I’m glad we weren’t blessed with children,” Leah said. “All my married life I prayed for children, begged God to give me just one child, but now I see the wisdom of His refusal. We won’t have to watch as our children are bullied, humiliated, injured, maybe even killed.”

The silence that followed the bitterness of these words lengthened as all three of them contemplated the dark void of the future.

“You’ll stay with us tonight,” Leo said at last. It wasn’t a question and Kurt felt another wave of gratitude for this couple’s generosity.

“Thank you,” he said. “I will. Then in the morning I’ll go to Munich.”

“Did you see the others, the others who were arrested the same night?” asked Leah tentatively. “Martin Rosen came home, just for a few days, and then he took his whole family and left. He didn’t say much.”

Kurt wasn’t surprised, Martin would certainly have been warned as he had. “Yes, Martin was there,” he said. “He got out before me. So, he’s gone?”

Leo nodded. “Yes, he’s gone.”

“But he had to leave everything behind,” said Leah. “All the tools in his workshop, all the furniture in his house. The Gestapo watched him pack up. They wouldn’t let him take anything that the family couldn’t carry between them as they walked out of the door.”

“One day they were there, the next they were gone.” Leo shook his head in disbelief. “There’s another family living in there now. Not Jews of course, but some official who works on the railway.” He looked across at Kurt. “Reckon someone would have moved into your place if it hadn’t been so badly damaged. No one can afford to repair it.” Leo passed Kurt another cigarette, and Kurt drew on it gratefully. He had no intention of telling the Meyers, or anyone else, that he had agreed that the state should take over his property.

“I shall go and have a look at it tomorrow before I go,” he said. “Just in case there is anything else I can salvage.” His mind flicked to the money he had hidden in the unused bread oven beside the stove in the living room. Was there any possibility it would still be there?

“Were Rudy Stein, or Manfred Schmied with you?” Leah was asking. “Do you know anything about them?”

Kurt forced his mind back to her question. “We were all together in one hut,” he said, “Rudy… died. He found the camp regime difficult and… and he wasn’t strong enough. I think Mannie is still there.” He drew deeply on his cigarette. “He may be released. I was let out because I agreed to collect my family and leave the country. I’ve got three weeks to prove to the authorities that we are emigrating… somewhere, otherwise I shall be sent back to Dachau, and the children will be put in an orphanage.” His face was bleak as he explained, “And God knows what will happen to Ruth.” He shook his head in despair. “I told them I had a cousin in America.”

“And have you?”

Kurt shook his head. “No, but unless I could convince them I had somewhere to go, they wouldn’t have let me out. This way at least we have a chance.”

Kurt spent the night in the bedroom his children had shared weeks earlier, and as he lay on the hard little bed he thought about them all. Ruth, his Ruth, so brave, so resourceful, saving the children from the fire. Finding the box, taking them all to Munich. Thank God they had got there safely. At least Herbert was there to look after them all until he, Kurt, could get there. Kurt thought of his children. Laura, only ten, but far older than her years, made to grow up too fast by what her life had become in the last few years. Inge, beautiful, spoilt, only six, but used to getting her own way. She seemed almost unaware of the animosity that surrounded them all. And then the twins, just three, prattling happily together as they played, so wrapped up in each other that they only seemed to be complete when both were there. His beloved family. Somehow he had to get them away, out of this benighted country, his family’s home for generations, which no longer accepted them as citizens, regarded them as subhuman.

He thought of his father, Amos, wounded fighting in the trenches for the Kaiser and the Fatherland. It hadn’t mattered then that he was a Jew, when the army was haemorrhaging men and every soldier was needed at the front. He’d been good enough to be a German then. And when he came home, limping from the shrapnel still lodged in his leg, Amos had slipped back into life as a shopkeeper, and brought his sons up to be both good Jews and good Germans.

Kurt had lied to them in Dachau and he knew it was a risk. He had no cousin in America, something the SS could discover easily enough if they bothered. He knew they had little chance of going to America, but they had to get out somewhere, and he had such a short time to make the arrangements. Thank God Ruth had found the deed box. She would have all the family documents safely with her, but, most important now, the deeds for the shop, which he must deliver to the Emigration Office in Munich. She had their passports, too, except for the twins’. Although Kurt didn’t expect the authorities to make it easy, they would probably allow him to put them on his, simply to get rid of them all.

But where they were going to go, and where the money was going to come from, he didn’t know. He had his watch and Ruth had her wedding ring, and he thought he remembered there were a brooch and some earrings in the box, which might fetch something. Otherwise they had no money. Any cash there might have been would, he realised, have been spent long ago.

Eventually, sleep overtook him, but it was a sleep beset with dreams; dreams of Dachau, dreams of the lorry that had taken him there, of the children calling his name, and the nightmare that finally startled him awake, Ruth on fire. She was running towards him, flames devouring her clothes, crackling through her hair, Ruth screaming, screaming to him for help, and he rooted to the spot unable to move as the fire engulfed her.

Kurt sat bolt upright in bed, his heart pounding, cold sweat running down his back, staring into the darkness. He could still hear her screams echoing in his head, and see the agony on her face.

There was no going back to sleep. Indeed Kurt didn’t dare, the nightmare had been so vivid, so real, he knew if he closed his eyes it would return. He switched on the light, and sitting with his eyes wide open waited for his racing heart to slow. He spent the rest of the night planning what he would do.

As soon as it was light, before much of the street was awake, he crossed the road again, and, with a claw hammer borrowed from Leo, levered the planks from the door and went into his shop. It was cold, dark and dank. Rain had blown in through the gaps in the planking, and the smell of damp soot was strong and acrid.

The shop had been gutted by the fire. There was nothing left but a smoke-blackened shell. The staircase was gone, and parts of the ceiling had collapsed, leaving the charred rafters exposed above.

Kurt looked up at the rafters, and then went back across the road to the bakery.

“Have you got a ladder I can borrow?” he asked Leo. “I need to try and get into the apartment, and the stairs have gone.”

“I have,” Leo said, leading him out to the back, “but be very careful, the whole building must be very unsafe.”

“I will,” promised Kurt, hefting the ladder over his shoulder.

“And don’t be long,” warned Leo. “If you’re seen, someone will report you for looting.”

“Hardly looting, it’s my own property!”

“Since when did that make any difference to the Gestapo?” replied Leo.

Kurt took the ladder over to the shop and set it up where the stairs should have been. Cautiously he climbed, not even sure if the beam supporting the ladder would take his weight. It appeared to do so and he scrambled up onto one of the more solid-looking rafters. The floor had burned away, but the old timbers of the house were thick and strong, and although they were scorched and blackened, most of them seemed to have survived the fire. Carefully Kurt edged his way along the landing till he reached the doorway of his bedroom. There was little left to see, all the furnishings and furniture were ash. He crossed the landing and looked into the girls’ room. Here it was the same, with only the remains of the old iron bedstead, a twisted misshapen mess, melted against the window. Water had been poured in to quench the fire, and with windows open to the rain the room was cold and dank. Reluctantly Kurt looked into all the rooms. The boys’ room had fared little better, and the comfortable kitchen living room, which had been the centre of their family life, was a blackened mess. Here, however, the damage had been caused more by smoke and water than by fire. Kurt edged his way into the room, fighting back tears as he saw what was left of their home. Then something caught his eye, stuffed into the corner of a chair. He reached out and pulled it clear.

“Bella!” he cried aloud, and hugged the doll, Inge’s favourite toy, convulsively to his chest. “Bella!”

Then, at last, he turned his attention to the old bread oven. Crossing the floor gingerly, he opened the heavy oven door and looked inside. There, kept safe from the smoke and the flames by the cast iron of the oven walls, lay the envelope into which he had put some of the money he’d taken from the bank. A wave of relief washed over him. He had what he’d come for. Now perhaps they had a chance. Hurriedly Kurt stuffed the envelope into one pocket of his jacket, and catching up Bella stuffed her into the other. Then he made his way back through the apartment, to the top of the ladder. As he passed the broken window that overlooked the street, he suddenly heard the tramp of marching feet. He didn’t have to look out of the window to know who was approaching. He was trapped in his own apartment, with his own money hidden in his coat, and the SS were coming down the street.