He brought in a tray with food and set it down on the table, and when he moved aside her jewelry and money, he nodded and smiled again. He tiptoed out of the room, turned the bolt once more, and let her sleep…

So it came about that Frau Rosenthal saw no human being during the first three days of her protective custody. She slept through the nights, and woke to anguished, fear-tormented days. On the fourth day, half-crazed, she did try something…

*Jewish women were forced to change their names to Sara by the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 (also known as the Nuremberg Racial Purity Laws); Jewish men were forced to call themselves Israel.

Chapter 11

IT IS STILL WEDNESDAY

In the end Frau Gesch wasn’t so hard-hearted as to wake the little man after an hour on the sofa. He looked so pitiable lying there in his exhausted sleep, the purple bruises slowly coming up on his face.

He had his lower lip pushed out like a sad child, and sometimes his eyelids trembled, and a deep sigh shook his chest, as though he were about to begin crying in his sleep.

When she had got her dinner ready, she woke him and gave him some food. He muttered his thanks to her. He ate like a wolf, looking at her from time to time, but not saying a word about what had happened to him.

In the end she said: “All right, that’s all I can give you, otherwise I won’t have enough left for my Gustav. Why don’t you lie back down on the sofa, and have some more sleep. I’ll talk to your wife…”

He muttered inaudibly; whether in agreement or disagreement was unclear. But he went back to the sofa willingly enough, and a minute later he was asleep again.

When Frau Gesch heard her neighbor’s door open in the late afternoon, she crept over quietly and knocked. Eva Kluge opened right away, but stood squarely in the doorway. “Well?” she asked defensively.

“Excuse me for bothering you again, Frau Kluge,” began Frau Gesch, “but I’ve got your husband lying next door. An SS man brought him in early this morning. You must have just left.”

Eva Kluge persisted in her defensive silence, and Frau Gesch continued, “He’s in quite a state, I think there’s no part of him that’s not bruised. I don’t know the ins and outs between you and your husband, but you can’t put him on the street as he is. Why don’t you have a look at him, Frau Kluge!”

Frau Kluge was unyielding: “I don’t have a husband anymore, Frau Gesch. I told you, I don’t want to hear any more.”

And she started to go back inside her flat. Frau Gesch said quickly, “Now don’t you be in so much of a hurry, Frau Kluge. After all, he’s your husband. You had children together…”

“Now that’s something I’m especially proud of, Frau Gesch!”

“There is such a thing as inhumanity, Frau Kluge, and what you’re proposing to do is inhuman. You can’t put him out in his condition.”

“And what about the way he treated me over all those years, was that human? He tormented me, he ruined my entire life, and in the end he took away my beloved son from me—and I’m supposed to be human to someone like that, just because the SS has given him a beating? I wouldn’t dream of it! All the beatings in the world won’t change that man!”

After these angry and vehement words, Frau Kluge slammed the door shut in Frau Gesch’s face. She couldn’t stand to hear any more. Perhaps to avoid more talk, she might have taken the man into her flat, and then have regretted it ever after!

She sat down in her kitchen chair, stared at the blue gas flame, and thought back over her day. Once she’d told the official that she wanted to leave the Party, effective immediately, there had been no end of talk. He’d begun by taking her off mail delivery duties. And then she had been questioned. At midday, a couple of civilians with briefcases had arrived and interrogated her. She was to tell them her whole life story, her parents, her siblings, her marriage…

At first she had been compliant, glad to change the subject after the endless questions about why she wanted to leave the Party. But then, when she was supposed to tell them about her marriage, she had gotten mulish. After the husband, it would be the turn of her children, and she wouldn’t be able to talk about Karlemann without those wily foxes noticing there was something the matter.

No, she’d refused to discuss it.