Jews were ordered to hand over fur coats. Jews were not allowed to receive eggs or milk. Jews were forbidden to use public telephones, forbidden to keep cats, dogs, or birds. Jews were banned from parks, restaurants, and swimming pools. Jews were evicted from their homes without reason or notice. All schools closed to Jewish children. Jews were forbidden to use the German greeting, ‘Heil Hitler’.
The bus driver’s veins bulged over the top of his hand, blue veins, as he reached for the lever that closed the door to the bus.
As a child I did not know that the colour of the blood in my veins was dark red; I thought it was blue.
When my father told me that my blood contained iron, I felt like a magician with great powers. I knew about iron: the gate to the garden behind our house was always described as ‘the iron gate’.
‘Make sure the iron gate is closed, Simone,’ my father said one late afternoon, as we sat in the garden on little iron chairs reading our books. I was reading Black Beauty, and when my father asked me what it was about, I told him, ‘Beauty, the horse, is always brave. Beauty runs fast because he knows someone is dying, and Beauty saves the woman’s life.’
In my mind Black Beauty was like my father’s horse, Charlotte. He leaned over, held my book in his hand and quickly thumbed through the pages until he stopped and pointed to this passage: ‘There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to man and beast, it is all a sham.’
When the bus driver closed the door to the bus, I thought about the iron gate in our garden and my father’s hand reaching for my book. I looked again at the bus driver’s blue veins.
Hava was not with me. In that moment, I wanted to ride Black Beauty and save her. Instead the gears of the bus groaned and growled and I, not in the saddle with Black Beauty, wept.