Wunderland(81)

He then sent her straight to the headmistress’s office to contemplate her “arrogance.”

Happily, Doktor Goldschmidt, who is also the school’s founder, has both a sense of humor and a love of Margaret Mitchell. In fact, the Doktor admitted to just having finished Gone with the Wind herself, and she and Renate had a nice chat about America’s civil war and dark history of slavery before walking back to Herr Lawerenz’s class together, where the Doktor urged Herr Lawerenz to accept Renate’s sincerest apology.

Now flying through the wintry garden grounds behind the school (the back entrance is less conspicuous and also tends to be unmonitored), Renate knows that the consequences might be far worse this time. If Herr Lawerenz does call for her suspension, what if even Doktor Goldschmidt is unable to change his mind? And if Renate is suspended, what if she then doesn’t have enough time to prepare for her university-qualifying Abitur exam? That, after all, was the whole point of coming here after leaving Bismarck last spring. Not only is the Jüdische Schule: Doktor Leonore Goldschmidt the only Jewish school in Berlin authorized to administer the exam, but it gives it in both English and German. At thirty-seven marks a month it is also expensive—she is only here because they gave her a scholarship. If she wastes this opportunity her parents will be furious.

She bursts through the double glass doors of the converted villa that, rumor has it, once housed Imperial family members and now houses some seven hundred banished Jewish students. Renate’s mouth is dry and sour-tasting; her heart feels as though it has a violent case of the hiccups. Struggling to catch her breath, she jogs past the closed classroom doors in the school’s East Wing, shrugging off her coat as she discards possible alibis: My mother needed help at the Jewish Hospital last night and we got home late. (No good: she’d need a note.) The tram broke down. (Too easy to disprove.) I left my Kennkarte at home and had to go back for it. That one is a little more plausible. The penalty for being caught without the mandatory identification card is stiff, even more so if it bears a glaring red J on its cover.

Reaching the classroom at last, Renate roots through her satchel for the document while listening for Herr Lawerenz’s gravel-filled voice. To her surprise, though, she doesn’t hear his voice at all. What she hears instead is the tense hum of fifty-odd students sounding very much unattended.

Which she discovers, as she opens the door, they are.

As always, the battered classroom is packed to bursting—not just with dozens of displaced Jewish youth, but with the jittery energy of a student body that has no idea what its near future might hold. Almost every family enrolled here is trying to emigrate or get its children onto a Kindertransport, though between the mountainous paperwork, extortionate departure fees, and endless waitlists for visas and ocean passage, the odds of escaping Germany are slight and getting slimmer. When it does happen, though, it happens quickly—students simply disappear, and are quickly replaced by others struggling against the same odds.

Today, though, Renate senses a darker element in the mood, which offsets her initial relief at not facing Herr Lawerenz. The atmosphere is not unlike that following the Anschluss last spring, when she came in to a hurricane of heated whispers about Viennese Jews scrubbing sidewalks with their own toothbrushes. Or after July’s Evian Conference, when nation after nation expressed sympathy for German Jews but kept their borders resolutely closed. (Jews for Sale, Der Stürmer gloated the following day. Who Wants Them? No One!)

“What’s happening?” she asks Bernhard Bh?r, a pink-faced boy with red acne scars on his cheeks, whom the others have nicknamed Piglet. “Where is Herr Lawerenz?”

“Meeting,” he says. “They’re all in a meeting.”

“About what?”

He looks at her as though she’s asked him if the sky is blue. “You haven’t heard?”

When she shakes her head he rolls his eyes, his face assuming a by-now familiar expression that roughly translates as: Don’t you ever pay attention to anything?

“The pogroms,” he says.

“What pogroms? Where?”

“Everywhere. Here, even. Good God, Bauer. Did you wear a blindfold to school? Didn’t you see the Hitlerjugend out front?”

“I came in the back,” she falters, wondering instinctively whether she might have missed Rudi.

“They’ve been setting synagogues on fire,” he says.

“What?”

“I hear they’re destroying Jewish shops and beating the owners,” adds Kinge Lehmann, looking up from one of the five newspapers on his desk. Wire-thin and plagued by asthma, he reads the Nazi press obsessively.

“I’ve heard they’ve thrown people from windows,” chimes in Piglet’s best friend who is nicknamed Pooh, though his real name is Rolf Sumner.

“Which ‘they’?” asks Renate. “The SS?”

“Along with the Gestapo and the Hitlerjugend. But pretty much everyone who’s not a Jew themselves is falling in behind them.” Kinge shakes his head in amazement. “You really missed it all? You didn’t see any of this on your way here? The smoke? The crowds?”

“I…” Renate feels her face heat. The only thing she noticed was that the car seemed quieter and less crowded than usual. And, of course, that she’d entirely missed her stop. “But why?”

“The Dwarf’s got the papers saying it’s a ‘spontaneous uprising’ of the people to protest vom Rath’s murder. But no one is buying it. They’re saying the people in charge are Sturmtruppen wearing civilian clothes.”