1939

At midnight, Father and I walked six blocks from our basement apartment to a nicer part of Düsseldorf, to the white stone townhomes where servants swept the streets and pinched back geraniums in window boxes. It was late September, but the air was warm still, “Führer-weather” they called it, since it permitted Hitler success in his campaigns. It had certainly worked with Poland.

I climbed the steps to the double doors, inset with filigreed, white-painted ironwork over frosted glass. I pressed the silver button. Was Katz even home? There was a faint glow behind the frosted glass, but the gas lanterns to either side of the door were not lit. Father waited on the street in the darkness, arms hugging his midsection.

I was twenty-five that year when Father’s symptoms grew bad enough for him to seek out his favorite old Jewish treater of the sick, a man named Katz. We were not allowed to call Jews doctors. The term “treaters of the sick” was preferred. Nor were Aryans allowed to frequent non-Aryan doctors, but my father seldom followed the rules.

The doorbell chimed somewhere deep in the house. I’d never set foot in a Jew’s house before and was in no hurry to do so, but Father insisted I accompany him. I wanted to spend as little time there as possible.

A brighter light appeared behind the frosted glass, and a dark shape moved toward me. The door to my right opened a crack to reveal a former medical school classmate of mine, one of the many Jewish students no longer welcome at the university. He was fully dressed, tucking his shirt into his pants.

“What do you want this time of night?” he said.

Behind him Katz descended the stairs, steps soundless on thick carpet, the train of his midnight-blue dressing gown fanned out behind him. He hesitated, hunched like a crone, eyes wide. Expecting the Gestapo?

Father hobbled up the front steps and stood next to me. “Excuse me, Herr Doktor,” he said, one hand on the doorjamb. “I am sorry to bother you, but the pain is unbearable.”

Once Katz recognized Father, he smiled and ushered us in. As we passed, the former medical student looked at me with narrowed eyes.

Katz led us into his paneled study, three times the size of our apartment, the walls lined with shelves of leather-bound books. It had a spiral staircase, which led up to the second level, to a railed balcony lined with more bookshelves. Katz turned a knob on the wall, and the crystal chandelier above us, hung with a thousand icicle pendants, came to life.

Katz eased Father down into a chair that looked like a king’s throne. I ran the tips of my fingers along the chair’s arm, across the red damask woven with threads of gold, smooth and cool.

“It’s no bother at all,” Katz said. “I was just reading. My bag, please, and a glass of water for Herr Oberheuser,” he said over his shoulder to the former medical student. The young man pressed his lips together in a hard line and left the room.

“How long has the pain been like this?” Katz asked.

I’d never known many Jews, but had read many accounts of them in schoolbooks and in Der Stürmer. Grasping and controlling. Cornering the market on law and medical jobs. But Katz seemed almost happy to see Father—strange, since we’d intruded on him at such an hour. This was a man happy in his work.

“Since dinner,” Father said, hugging his belly.

I was almost done with medical school at the time and could have counseled my father, but he insisted on seeing Katz.

I studied the room as Katz examined him. The black-and-white marble fireplace, the grand piano. The books on the shelves looked oiled and dusted, each one worth more than I made in a year, trimming roasts for Onkel Heinz part-time at his butcher shop. There was no doubt a well-used volume of Freud among them. Several lamps stood about the room throwing down pools of light even when no one was using them. If only Mutti could have seen that wastefulness.

Katz fingered the sides of Father’s neck. As he turned Father’s hand to take his pulse, the light caught a fat letter K monogrammed in silver thread on Katz’s dressing-gown sleeve.

“Working at the Horschaft factory may be causing this,” he said to Father. “I would stop working there immediately.”

Father winced, his skin sallow. “But we can’t live without that job.”

“Well, at least work in a ventilated area.”

The former medical student returned with a crystal glass of water and set it on the table next to us. Could he not bring himself to hand it to Father? Little did he know Father was on his side. If he hadn’t been so sick, Father would have hidden a whole tramcar of those people in our back bedroom.

Katz shook a pill from a bottle into Father’s hand and then smiled. “No charge.”

Was that how they did it? Got you hooked, then charged more later? Our schoolbooks outlined the various strategies Jews used to undermine hardworking Germans. They were taking over the medical world. My professors said they were stingy with their research results and barely shared findings outside their own circles.

While Father took his pill, I browsed the titles on the bookshelf: Clinical Surgery. Stages in Embryo Development in Humans and Vertebrates. Whole shelves of green leather tomes with titles such as Atlas of the Outer Eye Diseases and Atlas of Syphilis and Venereal Diseases.

“You like to read?” Katz asked.

“Herta graduates soon from medical school,” Father said. “On an accelerated track. She’s interested in surgery.” I excelled in the few surgery classes I was allowed to take, but being a woman, under national socialism, I was not allowed to specialize in surgery.

“Ah, the surgeon,” Katz said, smiling. “King of doctors, or at least the surgeons think so.” He pulled one of the green books from the shelf. “Atlas of General Surgery. Have you read it?”

I said nothing as he pushed the book toward me. It seemed some Jews shared.

“Once you learn everything in here, bring it back, and I’ll give you another,” he said.

I did not touch it. What would people say, me taking the book of a Jew?

“You are too generous, Herr Doktor,” Father said.

“I insist,” Katz said, still holding the book out.

It looked heavy, the leather cover soft, embossed in gold. Could I borrow such a thing? I wanted it. Not so much to read it. I had textbooks. Ugly and secondhand, other people’s notes scratched in their margins, breadcrumbs in their gutters. This book was a beautiful thing. It would be nice to be seen with it, to walk into class and drop it casually on my desk. Mutti would rage at Father for allowing me to take it, but that alone was worth it.

I took the book from Katz and turned away.

“She’s speechless,” Father said. “And a fast reader. She’ll return it soon.”

—

IT WAS A USEFUL BOOK, in some ways more detailed than our medical school textbooks. In less than one week, I read from “Inflammation and Repair of Tissue” through “Cancer of the Lymphatic System.” The text and color plates provided additional insight into my father’s condition. Epithelioma. Sarcoma. Radium treatments.

Once I made it through the last chapter of Katz’s book, “Amputations and Prosthesis,” and practiced two new surgical knots described there, I walked to the Jew’s house to return it, hoping for another.

When I arrived, the front doors were wide open, and the SS were carrying cardboard boxes of books, Katz’s black medical bag, and a white wicker baby carriage, its wheels spinning in midair, to the curb. Someone was plunking out a German folk tune on Katz’s piano.

I held the book tight to my chest and left for home. Katz would not be coming back for it. Everyone knew of these arrests. Most of the time they happened in the night. It was sad to see someone’s possessions taken in such a way, but the Jews had been warned. They knew the Führer’s requirements. This was unfortunate, but not new, and it was for the good of Germany.

Less than a week later I spied a new family with five sons and a daughter carrying suitcases and a birdcage into that house.

—

MY MOTHER WAS HAPPY to work in her brother Heinz’s meat market, across the bridge in Oberkassel, a wealthy part of town, and she had gotten me a job there too. It was a small shop, but Heinz filled every inch with meat. He hung hams and long ribs of pork outside along the front of the store like socks on a clothesline and displayed whole hogs spread-eagled, bellies slit wide, glistening entrails scooped and saved.

At first I blanched at the sight, but as a medical student interested in surgery, I gradually grew to see beauty in the most unlikely places. The startling ivory of a splayed rib cage. A calf’s severed head, peaceful as if asleep, a fringe of lashes black against the damp fur.

“I make good use of every part of an animal,” Heinz often said. “Everything but the squeal.” He boiled pig parts on the stove all day until the windows fogged and the shop somehow smelled both putrid and sweet as only a butcher shop can.

As greater numbers of Jews left the city, we became one of the few quality meat shops left, and business improved daily. One afternoon Heinz passed along news benefiting the customers lined up two deep at the front counter.

“You have to get over there to the platz, ladies. They are selling everything from the warehouses. I heard Frau Brandt found a sable coat there with a silk lining. Hurry, now.”

No one said they were selling items taken from the Jews, but we all knew.

“How awful they took people’s things away like that,” said Tante Ilsa, Heinz’s wife, who avoided the shop as much as she could. When she did come, she brought me a jar of her strawberry marmalade, which I’d once complimented. Ilsa kept her coat wrapped tight around her even though it was summer and stayed only two minutes. “It’s a sin to pick through someone’s things as if they’re dead.”

Tante Ilsa paid for most of my medical school costs. A kind praying mantis of a woman, tall and gentle with a head too small for her body, she’d been left a great deal of money by her mother and used it sparingly, no matter how Onkel Heinz brayed.

Heinz smiled, causing his piggy eyes to disappear into the folds of his fat face. “Oh, don’t worry, Ilsa. They probably are dead by now,” he said.

The patrons turned away, but I knew he was right. If Ilsa was not careful, her own considerable belongings would end up there alongside the Jews’. The gold cross around her neck was no protection. Did Ilsa know what Heinz did in the refrigerated room? Perhaps on an instinctual level, the way a calf knows to become restless on slaughter day.

“You shed a tear when the Jew Krystel’s shop closed, Ilsa. My own wife a Jew friend, shopping at the competition. That is loyalty, nicht?”

“He has those baby hens I like.”

“Had, Ilsa. It doesn’t help my business when this gets around. Soon you’ll be on the Pranger-Liste.”

I held my tongue, but I’d already seen Tante Ilsa’s name on the Pranger-Liste, the public list of German women who shopped at Jewish stores, posted about the town, a black stripe running diagonally across it.

“You don’t see Krystel’s wife in here,” Heinz said. “Thank God. And no more Frau Zates, either. Wants a cabbage but will only pay for a half. Who buys half a cabbage? I cut it, and who buys the other half? No one, that’s who.”

“Why should she buy whole when she needs only half?” Ilsa asked.

“Mein Gott, she does it on purpose. Can’t you see?”

“Keep your thumb off the scale, or you’ll have no customers, Heinz.”

Mutti and I left Heinz and Ilsa to bicker and walked along to the sale at the platz. It was rare Mutti had any time to shop, since she was up at five-thirty each day to do mending before she cleaned houses or worked in the shop. Thanks to the Führer’s economic miracle, she was working fewer afternoon hours but still seemed just as tired at day’s end. She took my hand as we crossed the street, and I felt her rough skin. I could barely look at her dishpan hands, red and peeling from cleaning toilets and dishes. No amount of lanolin cream could heal them.

People gathered in the square to watch as Wehrmacht soldiers threw household items into great piles and displayed finer items on tables. My pulse quickened as I approached the heaps, sorted according to use and gender. Shoes and handbags. Crates of costume jewelry. Coats and dresses. Not all the finest styles, but with a little hunting, one could find the best labels for next to nothing. That elevated Mutti’s mood, and she started a pile for us.

“Look, Chanel,” I said, holding out a red hat.

“No hats,” Mutti said. “You want lice? And why cover your hair, your best asset?”

I tossed the hat back on the pile, pleased with the compliment. Though my shoulder-length hair was not white blond, many would have considered it honey gold in the right light, a good thing, since every German girl wanted blond hair, and the use of peroxide was discouraged.

We passed a mound of canvases and framed pictures. A painting of two men embracing lay on top, the canvas spiked through on a spear from a sculpture below.

“My God, Jew art,” Mutti said. “Can’t they just hang a calendar on the wall like the rest of us?”

On his way home from the pharmacy, Father joined us there by the piles. The creases on his face looked deeper that day. A rough night on the sofa.

I lifted a scrapbook from a table and flipped through the pages, past black-and-white photographs of someone’s beach vacation.

“This is undignified,” Father said. “You two call yourselves Christians?”

Of course he disapproved. Why had he even stopped to speak with us? I tossed the scrapbook on our pile.

“Anton, can you not relax a bit?” Mutti said.

I pulled a painting, one of two of grazing cows, out from under a crush of framed canvases. It was well done, perhaps even a masterwork. Traditional German art. Just what the Propaganda Ministry found suitable, and something every cultured woman should own.

“What do you think, Mutti?”

Mutti pointed at the cows and laughed. “Oh, it’s you, Kleine Kuh.”

Kleine Kuh was Mutti’s nickname for me. Little heifer. As a child she’d had a brown cow that I reminded her of. I had long ago dealt with not being as dainty and blond as my mother, but the name still rankled.

“Don’t call Herta that,” Father said. “No girl should be called a cow.”

It was good to have Father’s support, even if he was a lawbreaker who listened to foreign broadcasts and read every foreign newspaper he could lay hands on. I took the two paintings and set them in our pile.

“Where have the owners of all this gone?” I asked, though I had a general idea.

“To the KZ, I suppose,” Mutti said. “It’s their own fault. They could have stepped aside. Gone to England. They don’t work; that is the problem.”

“Jews have jobs,” Father said.

“Ja, of course, but what jobs? Lawyers? That is not really work. They own the factories, but do they do the work? No. I’d rather do ten jobs than work for them.”

Mutti pulled a dressing gown from the pile and held it up. “Would this fit you, Anton?” Father and I didn’t have to see the silver K on the sleeve to know who the former owner was.

“No, thank you,” he said, and Mutti walked off, scouting the piles.

“Are you sure, Father?” I took the dressing gown and held it out to him. “It’s a nice one.”

He took a step back. “What has happened to you, Herta? Where is my girl with the tender heart, always first to take up the collection can for the neediest? Katz was a man you could have learned from.”

“I haven’t changed.” It was obvious he didn’t support or even like me much, but did he have to broadcast this?

“Katz was compassionate. A doctor without love is like a mechanic.”

“Of course I’m compassionate. Do you know what it’s like to be able to change a person’s life just with these hands?”

“You’ll never be a surgeon with Hitler around. Can’t you see that? Your generation is so pigheaded.”

Much as I hated to admit it, he was right about the surgeon part. As one of a handful of women in my medical school, I’d been lucky to be able to study dermatology, never mind surgery, and had received only basic surgical training.

“We all must sacrifice, but Germany’s changing thanks to my generation. Such poverty yours left us with.”

“Hitler will be the death of all of us, just taking what he wants—”

“Quiet, Father,” I said. How dangerous for him to respond in such a way in public. He even told jokes about Party leaders. “Hitler is our hope. In no time, he’s gotten rid of the slums. And he must take. Germany can’t thrive without room to expand. No one will just give back the land we’ve lost.”

Many parents had grown wary of confronting their children for fear of being denounced by them, but not my father.

“He’s killing Germany to feed his own vanity.”

“This war will be over within weeks. You’ll see,” I said.

He turned with a dismissive wave.

“Go straight home and rest before afternoon coffee, Father.”

He walked away, barely avoiding a passing tram. Father would need a nap. The cancer was having a party in his body. Could Katz have helped him live? It was no good wasting time with such thoughts. I busied myself searching the piles for medical books.

Mutti hurried to me. “I found rose-scented soap…and a toaster.”

“Don’t you worry about Father, Mutti? He’s going to be denounced. I can feel it.”

Though my parents were both products of German blood and could trace their pure German ancestry back to 1750, my father could not hide his lack of enthusiasm for the Party. He still put his traditional striped German flag in our front window next to Mutti’s new red Party one, though Mutti was always moving his to a side window. No one noticed it in the sea of swastikaed flags hung outside every building, but it was only a matter of time before someone turned him in.

“Ja, feind hirt mitt, Herta,” Mutti said. The enemy is listening.

She pulled me closer. “Don’t worry about that, Kleine Kuh. Focus on work.”

“I’m allowed only dermatology—”

Mutti pressed her fingers into my forearm. “Stop it. You’ll be working with the best and brightest soon. You can go all the way.”

“Someone needs to rein Father in.”

Mutti turned away. “What will people say if we have these things in our home?” she said, shaking her head at the toaster in her hand.

We paid for the items we’d chosen: the toaster, the scrapbook, the paintings, and a mink stole with the glass-eyed heads still attached, a luxury item Mutti was willing to risk lice for. The soldiers threw in a doctor’s framed diploma Mutti said she’d use to display her Aryan blood certificate and some canvas running shoes for me. All for only ten marks. We seldom had bread to toast, and Mutti could not afford to go anywhere she could wear such a mink, but the smile on her face made it all worthwhile.

—

I WAS HAPPY TO HAVE those new running shoes for a sleepaway trip I was chaperoning the next week at Camp Blossom, a camp situated in a pine forest half a day’s train ride north of Düsseldorf. It was run by the Belief and Beauty Society, which was affiliated with the BDM, the Bund Deutscher Mädel or the League of German Girls, the female wing of the Nazi Party youth movement. The Belief and Beauty Society was for older girls only, to prepare them for domestic life and motherhood. This sleepaway trip was intended to transition the younger ones into the organization, and my job as unit leader was to look after the girls in my cabin—not an easy job.

Unit leaders received day assignments, and I was sent to the craft hut, a blatant mismatch, since I considered painting amateurish watercolors and weaving gimp lanyards a complete waste of time. Plus, my considerable talents lay outside the art world. With my extensive medical training, I should have been running the camp health clinic, but one serves where one is needed. At least the hut looked out over the lake, which reflected the reds and oranges of the trees surrounding it.

Pippi, another girl assigned to work the craft hut, joined me there one afternoon. I’d known Pippi since we’d both joined BDM, and though she was a few years younger than I, we were good friends, well on our way to being best friends, something every other girl seemed to have. Pippi and I had done everything in BDM together. Earned our badges and leadership cords. Taken turns carrying the flag in at meetings. At the camp we shared meals and even tidied up the worktables in the craft hut together.

“Let’s hurry,” I said. “It’s about to rain.”

Pippi took the scissors from the tables and plunked them into the metal cans around the room. She was terribly slow about it.

She nodded out the window. “Look who’s waiting.”

At the edge of the woods, two boys stood, one blond, one dark-haired, next to a rowboat pulled up onshore, a deep rut in the sand behind it. I recognized them, unit leaders from the adjacent boys’ camp, dressed in camp uniform khaki shirts and shorts. They were part of the boat crew. Handsome boys, of course. No camper of low racial value was allowed at any German youth camp, so everyone was attractive, guaranteed to be racially pure. There’d been no need to measure our heads and noses with calipers and craniometers. We’d all submitted pure genetic histories.

They fiddled with the boat’s oarlocks, taking glances back at the craft hut.

“You know what those boys want, Pippi.”

Pippi checked her face in the mirror above the sink. Next to it a poster fixed to the wall with tacks read: REMEMBER YOU ARE GERMAN! KEEP YOUR BLOOD PURE!

“So what? I just want to try it. It’s fun.”

“Fun? We can’t finish a relay race here without couples heading for the woods.” What fun was a race if no one won?

At Camp Blossom, the staff were encouraged to look the other way if Aryan couples paired off. If a pregnancy resulted, the mother was sent to a luxurious SS spa-clinic, and the birth of a healthy child was celebrated, no matter if the mother was married. All this focus on children was understandable, of course, since the future of Germany depended on populating our country. But with my sights set on becoming a physician, I could not afford a pregnancy. I slid a pair of scissors from one of the metal cans and secreted them in my shorts pocket.

Pippi’s eyes widened. “Ever done it yourself?” she asked in a casual voice.

“It hurts, you know. And no matter what they say, if you have a baby, you’ll be sent out of the BDM, shipped off to Wernigerode. The middle of nowhere.”

Pippi pulled a stack of postcards from her shorts pocket. They featured views of Die Mutter-hauser des Lebensborns, a stately chalet. One showed a nurse tending to a ruffled bassinet on a tree-lined terrace under the SS flag.

“They say it’s like being on holiday—the best of everything. Meat. Real butter—”

“Maybe, but the father will not be involved. Once the child is born, they take it away to be raised by strangers.”

“You throw a wet blanket on everything, Herta,” she said, fanning herself with the cards.

Once the boys finished fiddling with the boat, they stood, hands in pockets. I tried to stall, waiting for them to leave, but eventually we had to go.

Side by side, Pippi and I started down the path to our cabin. We turned, saw the boys following us, quickening their pace, and Pippi bit her lip into a smile.

“Hurry,” I said, pulling Pippi by the arm.

The boys picked up speed and Pippi and I took off toward the woods. I left the path and crashed through low brush and briers while Pippi, an accomplished sprinter, lagged behind. As I ran, the sting of the scissors’ point stabbed my leg. Why did this make me feel so oddly alive?

I ran around to the far side of an abandoned cabin next to a rushing stream and crouched on the mossy bank. Catching my breath, I set my scissors down and examined the wound on my thigh. It was a surface wound but had produced a startling amount of blood. Despite the sound of the rushing water, I heard the boys nab Pippi.

“You run so fast,” she said, laughing. The three clambered into the cabin, and I brushed away the jealousy I felt. What would it be like to kiss such a good-looking boy? Did I need to tell my supervisor if Pippi succumbed?

“What a good kisser you are,” I heard Pippi say.

I heard the creak of the bedsprings, more giggling from Pippi, and then moans from one boy. Where was the other one? Watching?

Pippi put up embarrassingly little resistance, and I heard them breathing hard and loud. How could she?

“You can’t keep your clothes on,” one boy said.

“It’s so dirty in here,” Pippi said.

I crouched there motionless, for any move would reveal my position. Pippi seemed to be enjoying it all, but then she had a change of heart.

“No, please,” she said. “I need to get back—”

“It’s not fair to get this far—”

“You’re hurting me,” she cried. “Herta!”

Friends help each other, but I’d warned her. Why hadn’t she listened? Her lack of discipline was a weakness.

“Help!” Pippi cried. “Someone, please—”

Aiding her would only endanger me, but I couldn’t leave her in that situation. I took up the scissors, cold and heavy, and stole to the rotted cabin steps in the almost darkness.

The screen door lay on the ground, off its hinges, so the doorway provided a good view. There were many rusted metal beds in there standing on end, and Pippi lay on the only horizontal one. It had collapsed, the mattress ticking stained and torn. One of the boys was lying on top of her, his ass blue-white in the dark room, smooth and hard and pumping as she cried. The second boy, the dark-haired one, stood at the head of the bed pinning Pippi’s shoulders.

I stepped over gaps from missing floorboards into the cabin.

“Stop it,” I said.

The second boy lit up when he saw me, perhaps hoping for a chance himself. I brandished the scissors, a dull silver in the dark room.

“She’s serious,” said the dark-haired boy. He released Pippi’s shoulders.

The blond one slammed himself into Pippi with renewed vigor at the prospect of her backing out.

I stepped closer. “Get off her,” I said.

“Let’s go,” said the dark-haired boy.

The blond pulled himself off Pippi, grabbed his shorts from the floor, and left with his friend, both avoiding my scissors. Pippi just cried there on the mattress. I untied the bandanna from my neck and placed it on the bed.

“You can use this to clean yourself,” I said.

I left her and walked outside to make sure the boys were gone. Satisfied they were not coming back, I walked to the stream. I raised the scissors and felt for a handful of my long hair, pulled it taut, and cut. Every muscle relaxed with that release, and I continued, feeling for any stray lock, until my hair was cropped to less than a thumb’s length all around. I tossed my hair into the river and watched it travel downstream, sliding over rocks, off into the darkness.

I helped Pippi back to our cabin. With much crying, she thanked me for rescuing her and admitted she should have followed my advice. She promised to write once she got home to Cologne.

Pippi’s parents retrieved her the next day, not at all happy, if their abrupt manner was any indication. I watched her leave, as she waved through the rear window of her parents’ car, my one friend gone.

For the rest of my stay, I kept my scissors close, but in the end my self-cut hair did the trick, and boys let me be. When the sleepaway trip concluded, half of my cabin went home fingers crossed, hoping to have a baby, while I left camp happily without a fertilized egg.