Wunderland(43)
And somehow it’s this—not the lingering sting of Herr Hartmann’s grade or labels, not the hot humiliation of having walked straight into Sofi’s trap, but her former best friend’s back, white-clothed and ruler-straight—that pushes Renate past the edge. She is on her feet before she realizes it, moving swiftly toward the door, only faintly hearing Herr Hartmann’s “Now where on earth are you off to, Fr?ulein Bauer?”
When she keeps walking he repeats the question, an octave higher. “Madame Mischling,” he shouts. “Are you deaf? Where are you going?”
Renate pauses in the doorway, just long enough to turn back. The words lie there on her tongue, spiked with rage and fully formed: Nach Jerusalem. She opens her mouth to say them, gaze locked not with Herr Hartmann’s but with Ilse’s, as gray and blank as a cloudless sky before sunrise. But when she tries to speak her stomach clenches, her mouth and throat emitting nothing but a dry and silent rasp of air. She’s like a car, out of fuel. She has just enough power to turn on her heel and continue walking.
* * *
The break with Ilse had been less abrupt than with Rudi, and yet ultimately, that had made it more tortuous. At first she’d let herself hope the lengthening silences between them were simply circumstantial: a phase. After all, they had both made new friendships: Ilse on her BDM camping trips and hikes and Renate within an informal Judea study group Franz had formed, half in irony but also half not. (“If we’re to be citizens of this so-called Jewish Nation,” he reasoned, “we should at least know a little about the place.”)
The group included two members of his still-secret “Schiller” study group (one Jewish, one Catholic), the Beidryzcki twins, a boy from the Betar Zionist movement Franz had recently become intrigued by, and two other Mischlinge whose parents knew Renate’s parents. Renate had agreed to join out of boredom at first: with the BDM now officially the only legal club at school, there was nothing else that she could join. Even then, she had braced herself to be as revolted by all things jüdisch as everyone around her seemed to be. To her surprise, though, in this instance too, her mother—who claims “engaging trauma often lessens its impact”—turned out to be right. The sessions not only helped her understand Judaism as a religion but leached away some of the toxic sting of being a Halbjude.
Part of it was because, when one studied it through history books and religious tracts (rather than through government publications and Der Stürmer) Judaism bore no resemblance at all to the parasitic, lecherous, and sinister cult she’d been taught to despise. For one thing, the stories they read from the mysterious-sounding Torah were largely ones she’d always considered Christian fables. Only their order really differed, and the way they were read: while Christians were simply told what the stories were supposed to mean, Jews were actually encouraged to argue about their interpretation, just as generations upon generations of rabbis before them had enthusiastically done in writing in the Midrash.
What was more, nothing in either the stories or the debates involved what she’d long been told was Judaism’s version of the Holy Trinity: material wealth, ritual sacrifice, and world domination. Instead, they were about things like peace and mutual respect, learning to love both one’s own people and the strangers among them.
But the biggest surprise for her had been the music.
Renate had first heard it on a warm night last September, wafting out of the enormous and stately Fasanenstra?e Synagogue as she walked home. As it was mere blocks from her house, she had passed it by hundreds of times without giving it particular thought. This time, though, the sonorous organ tones that had washed into the darkening street had called out to her like the ancient, lonely cry of a siren. She listened to the end, and to the end of the next song. Then she found herself in a back pew, where she sat for the next half hour between a young woman with a sleeping baby and an older woman in a lacy black veil. The candles were lit, the rabbi reading from a list of the newly dead, his voice a soft-falling snow of gentle grief. And though she had no one physically to mourn, for the first time in months Renate had felt that it was not just permitted but somehow fitting to weep. And so she had.
“It was actually rather beautiful,” she told Ilse the next day, as they perched together on the lip of the dried-up fountain in the upper school courtyard. “And to be honest, it didn’t feel very different from church.”
By that point, Ilse and Renate hardly saw one another outside school hours. But in school, at least, Ilse was still there when it counted. When Rudi broke things off, Ilse wrote a mock story for her newsletter titled “Hitlerjugend’s Prettiest Boy Breaks with Sweetheart to Propose Marriage to Führer Himself.” When the headmaster decreed that all non-Aryans had to move to the back of all the classrooms, she had agitated on Renate’s behalf (“She’s half Aryan! Shouldn’t she at least get to sit somewhere in the middle?”). Upon losing that argument she continued to perch pointedly on Renate’s desk until the bell rang. She still met Renate in the courtyard before and after school, even though it meant other girls started avoiding her too.
As gestures these all fell short of revolutionary. In fact, they weren’t even particularly risky. But they helped make the days a little easier for Renate to get through, as did the flash of silver Renate still spied on Ilse’s hand when she waved or gave the Führer’s salute.