August 7, 1933
Metamorphosis!” exclaims Dr. Kreitz. “That’s what the English call this book,” and he waves its pages in the air with a flourish. “Can anyone tell me what that word means?” He leans on the teacher’s table, shirtsleeves pulled up to his elbows. Not one of us makes a sound from our wooden benches in my new classroom at the gymnasium.
No more dusty, higgledy-piggledy volksschule for me. The small, black cinder playground and rough children are a distant memory from before the long summer break. The gymnasium is all high arches and echoey corridors. In its center, a great hall with a high beamed ceiling beneath its grand, red mansard roof. Here, the teachers are taller, smarter, stricter. I might have gotten better marks in the entrance test than Karl did three years ago, when he sat for them like me, at eleven; but now I’m here, I don’t feel very clever at all.
“Does it mean transformation?” Someone at the back breaks the silence. I twist around and glimpse a small girl with frizzy black hair, a little like my own.
“Name, please,” Dr. Kreitz says, his head popping up, eyes bulging out, reminding me of a frog.
“Freda Federmann,” says the girl in a confident voice.
“Wonderful. Yes, Freda,” Dr. Kreitz enthuses. “Transformation. Rebirth. Conversion. From the Greek metamorphoun, meaning ‘to transform.’” He begins to pace. “Studying the Greeks and Romans,” he says, “will teach us all we need to know about the human condition.”
“Freda Federmann is a Jewess,” I hear someone hiss to her neighbor from the row behind me. It’s loud enough for the professor to hear, but he shows no sign of it. He picks up a book from the table as he passes by.
The professor has narrow shoulders and a potbelly. Part of his shirt hangs from his trousers and his tie is askew. This school, famous for its classical education, clearly picked him for his knowledge and superior brain, not for his appearance.
“Franz Kafka,” he says, staring intently up at the ceiling, as though he might see the author perched on top of the rafters. “What a brilliant, and amusing, man he was. Listen.” He vigorously flicks through some pages, his hair flopping wildly. He begins to read, treading a slow circuit of the room. He tells us, in a mesmerizing voice, the story of Gregor, the traveling salesman who awakens one morning to find himself transformed into an enormous insectlike creature.
Light filters through the long, rectangular windows set high up on the classroom wall. Adolf Hitler stares serenely down at us all from his vast portrait above the blackboard. Dr. Kreitz’s voice rises and falls, fades and resounds. As I look at the portrait, Hitler’s face appears to swell and move. He gazes at me, unblinking, but I’m certain his lips have moved, twitched, as if at any moment he might smile and step down from the picture, saying ha ha, what a joke, I have been here all along.
He doesn’t, of course, and I tear my eyes away. Karl says I have too much imagination. My heart jumps and I wonder if he’s right.
Dr. Kreitz reads on. I avoid looking at Hitler’s picture and instead study the profile of the girl sitting next to me. Tall and elegant, she has long auburn hair that hangs either side of her shoulders in two smooth plaits. Her pale face is so perfectly formed, it could have been chiseled from the finest marble. She holds her chin high as she watches Dr. Kreitz travel around the room. Feeling my gaze, she turns and fixes me with sloping green eyes.
“Hello,” she whispers. “My name is Erna Bäcker.” A smile flickers on her lips.
“Hetty Heinrich,” I reply, excruciatingly aware of my frizzy dark hair, big eyes, and too-round cheeks.
Erna Bäcker is simply the most bewitching creature I have ever seen in my life.
A knock on the classroom door stops Dr. Kreitz’s reading abruptly.
“Herr Hofmann . . .” He addresses the tall, thin man, wearing a waistcoat and bow tie, who enters the room.
“Heil Hitler,” Herr Hofmann greets the class.
“Heil Hitler,” we echo back.
“Headmaster”—Dr. Kreitz clears his throat—“delighted you can join us.”
Herr Hofmann sweeps to the front of the class.
“Welcome to our wonderful gymnasium,” he says, smiling around the classroom. “You’ve all done extremely well to get here. But this is only the beginning. During your time at this school, with hard work and exemplary behavior, you can become exceptional. This is true not only for the boys, but for you girls, too. In the fullness of time, you shall go on to become wonderful members of our great new Reich. I am sure you will make both your parents and our school proud. Best of luck to you all.”
I smile back at him. My dream is to become a doctor, preferably a world-famous one. I feel that, being here, at this great school, is one step closer to achieving my ambition. I shall try my very best at all my lessons. Always.
Herr Hofmann turns to Dr. Kreitz. “What are you studying this morning?”
Dr. Kreitz silently shows him the cover of Metamorphosis.
A look of horror passes over Herr Hofmann’s face. “Dr. Kreitz, have you lost your mind?”
He shrugs. “It’s a wonderful text, Herr Hofmann. Perfect for introducing the themes we are studying this year: symbolism, the metaphor, the absurdity of life—”
“We will discuss this later,” Herr Hofmann says brusquely. “In the meantime, as well you know, this is not an appropriate text to be studying. Ensure you choose a suitable German author next time. Good day, children,” and he sweeps from the room, banging the door shut behind him.
Dr. Kreitz shrinks.
His hand trembles as he returns to his desk and slides Metamorphosis into his bag. He licks his lips and stares at us, as if not sure what to do next. Chatter breaks out among the class and he makes no attempt to stop it.
Again, he reminds me of a frog, but this time, one that has been squashed and flattened on a busy road.
TOMAS IS WAITING for me when I come out of school. Long-legged and skinny, he leans nonchalantly against the trunk of a large tree on Nordplatz. Before I can make a run for it, he spots me and rushes over, bumping into me with a crooked smile.
“What’s it like then?” he asks, looking over his shoulder at the school. We fall in behind a noisy group of older pupils streaming across the grassy square toward Gohlis.
“It’s still school. Just . . . smarter and stricter, that’s all.”
Tomas looks a little wistful. He’d go there in a shot, if only his parents could afford the fees. He’s clever enough to pass the test.
“It’s odd, you not living in our block anymore,” Tomas says. “Emptier,” he adds after a pause.
“I’m not far away.”
“I guess.” He’s breathing heavily as we walk, pausing to cross Kirchplatz. “What’s your new place like then?”
“Just wait till you see it.” I laugh. “After the flat, you won’t believe . . . Come on,” and I break into a run, a bubble of excitement rising inside.
Our vast new house on Fritzschestrasse has a pointy roof and two chimneys sticking up like thick fingers toward heaven. There are four layers of windows. We could have a whole floor each.
“It’s the biggest house in the street,” Tomas says as he stares up in awe at the handsome building, all sandy brick and trimmed with black. His tawny hair is disheveled and his eyes insect-big through the grubby lenses of his tortoiseshell glasses. He screws up his nose as he surveys its vastness.
I stand taller.
“Does it have a garden out back?”
“Of course it does! That’s my room.” I point up at the window with the balcony overlooking the road on the second floor. There’s a beautiful old cherry tree growing beneath it. Its branches extend over the iron railings and the pavement on one side and under the balcony on the other. From my special seat in the window, I can see the junction with Berggartenstrasse and nearly the whole of Fritzschestrasse until it bends around to the right, near Walter’s flat. I watch him come and go.
“It must be very grand inside.” Tomas presses his face right up against the iron railings. “Bet it’s got two staircases. And a cellar. Maybe it’s even got a dungeon with prisoners’ bones in it!”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“Can I come in?” asks Tomas.
I steal a sideways look at him. Even though it’s only been a few weeks, it feels like a different lifetime when he and I played in the street behind the flat we used to live in. It was the old me who kicked a ball around and slid down the muddy embankment to watch the trains puffing in and out of the station.
“Not today,” I hear myself say. “Sorry. Maybe another time,” and I push my way through the sturdy iron gate. It opens with a creak and when I let go, it shuts Tomas out with a loud and satisfying clunk.
In the echoey, wooden-floored hall I put down my satchel and remember the day we moved here in June.
“I’ll need a cook, and full-time maid,” Mutti had said, standing in this very spot, looking around in wonder. I can almost still smell her flowery wafts of Vol de Nuit. “I can’t possibly manage this house without help,” she’d said, her hand on her chest.
Vati, cool and relaxed, dressed casually in slacks and an open-necked shirt, had tousled my hair and said, “The most desirable residence in the whole of Leipzig. Or at least one of them.”
“I love it,” I remember saying, smiling into his baggy face.
“Who would have thought it, eh, Schnuffel? Who would ever have dreamed it?” he’d said, as he picked up a box, kicking open a door off the hallway with his foot. “My study,” he’d said in a satisfied voice and disappeared inside.
“Can I pick a bedroom?” Karl had asked, eyes gleaming at the thought of a room all to himself.
“Why not?” Mutti replied, and I’d followed her as she’d carried out an inventory of the furniture and artwork the previous people had left in the house.
It’d be hard to forget the first time I saw the red-gold dining room; the bright afternoon sitting room with big patches of sunlight on the carpet and the grand piano; the pale-blue morning room with a gramophone in one corner; and the glass-domed garden room filled with wicker furniture and jungle plants. Our old flat would have fitted neatly into the hallway alone, with room to spare around the edges.
A surge of happiness now fills my chest like a swelling balloon and I run across the hall, my footsteps reverberating, through the stone-floored passageway, past the big kitchen and washroom, and out into the glorious sunshine of our triangular-shaped garden with its grass in the middle, flowers around the edge, and huge oak tree at the bottom. There’s no railway line here like there was behind the flat. I won’t miss the trains that shook my bed as they rattled and screeched their way to who-knows-where in the middle of the night.
I walk to the end of the garden and stare up through the dappled leaves and branches of the giant, old oak tree. Even though we no longer go to church—Vati says it detracts from our greater cause, and besides, Herr Himmler wouldn’t like it—I know that God has smiled on me. He has given me this, because I’m special: a treehouse. Real. Solid. With a proper roof and walls. A narrow rope ladder dangles down from a hole in the middle of the wooden floor.
Just wait until Tomas sees this. He’ll be mad with envy. I picture his face and laugh out loud.