The Wartime Affair

Chapter One

Elsa’s eyes sprang open to the sound of shattering glass.

She froze as every sense in her body sharpened.

Angry voices, many of them. Loud banging.

Far too close. The crack of an object breaking.

Something was happening in the street below.

It was not in her room. The realization unlocked her limbs, and she slipped from the covers.

Carefully she navigated the dark shadows of her bedroom to get to the window.

The noise was louder here . . . more violent, more threatening.

Her veins felt on fire with fear. She touched the faded curtain, hoping the breaking glass and angry voices from down below had an innocent explanation.

The hope was as futile as it was stupid.

Her brother, Otto, arrived at her bedroom door, hair tousled, his face marked with the red lines of deep sleep.

‘Can you hear it?’

She nodded.

He crossed the room and edged the opposite side of the curtain away from the wall to look down on the street below. ‘They are surrounding the Rabbi’s house. What do they want?’

Elsa gently moved the curtain aside to peek through the crack.

An angry mob crowded in front of their neighbour’s house, their fists raised as they cheered on a small core of Brownshirts who were attempting to break down the door.

The door held fast as lights were turned off, one by one, in the rooms above.

‘I don’t know. They look furious.’

The crowd parted as an uprooted street sign arrived, carried on the shoulders of four men.

‘Who are they?’

‘Some of them are Brownshirts.’

Otto moved the curtain a little more. ‘Yes, I can see that. Are they trying to restore order?’

Elsa felt sick. Intimidation and violence had become the Brownshirts’ usual method.

Tonight they appeared to be instigating it.

‘No, I don’t think so.’ Her gaze moved from face to face.

Most were men, but there were women too.

To Elsa’s shock, she recognized one of the men.

‘Herr Henoch is down there! He teaches at our school!’

‘He is not the only one we know,’ said Otto soberly.

Elsa scanned the other faces. The mob was disorganized, jostling about with no obvious goal.

Many faces were obscured by hats or the turn of their heads, but gradually familiar faces began to appear with as much hatred in their faces as the Brownshirt thugs they stood alongside.

Most of the mob broke away and headed in the direction of the town centre.

A group of stragglers seemed torn between staying at the Rabbi’s house and following, but then turned their attention back to the house, some handing out bricks and hammers.

Eerie sounds of breaking glass in the distance carried to them on the breeze.

Finally, the Rabbi’s door succumbed to the vicious onslaught and the triumphant crowd eagerly spilled into the building.

‘Why is this happening here?’ asked Otto.

Elsa wondered herself. Gollnow was a peaceful town, its medieval boundary wall evidence of its long, albeit politically fragile, history.

Its houses and church nestled around the banks of the River Ihna, not many miles from the coast of the Baltic Sea.

The inhabitants were friendly, or at least she had always thought they were, since her family had made the town their home four years ago.

‘They are after Rabbi Rozenblum,’ said her father from the bedroom door. His face was haggard. Her mother was on his heels, tearful and shivering in the cold night. ‘I cannot believe it has come to this,’ he added. ‘They are behaving like animals.’

‘We should stop them,’ suggested Otto.

‘How?’ their mother asked angrily. ‘Your father with his bad heart? Your frail grandfather? Me, a woman in her fifties? Or perhaps we should send your sisters down there? Do you think that angry mob will listen?’

‘I will lose my job if I speak up for the Rabbi.’ The words were out before Elsa had a chance to stop herself. It made her nauseous to think how quickly she had distanced herself from her neighbour. How could she? The Rabbi was a good man. Was this the person she was becoming?

‘We have to do something,’ insisted Otto. ‘What if they hurt him? What if they kill him?’

Her father shook his head. ‘Now you are talking nonsense. If anyone will get hurt it will be us. They will think we are anti-Nazi. They will think we are against the Führer.’

‘I should go down,’ said Elsa, although her feet did not move. ‘Perhaps I could talk to Herr Henoch. He might listen to a fellow teacher . . . though I’m just a trainee.’

She was relieved when her father stopped her. ‘Stay where you are. You are a young woman with a head full of hopes and dreams who loves her motherland. If you, one of their own, stand up for a Jew, they will despise you the most.’

Another locked door somewhere deep inside the Rabbi’s house gave way with a sickening crack.

Her father jerked his head towards the men as they piled into the house. ‘You cannot calm a rabid dog, Elsa, no matter how sincere you are. I will make my feelings known when the violence has ended. It is one angry mob. As terrible as it is, it will be over by the morning.’

Their mother began to cry again.

‘Your mother is upset,’ he added, caressing his wife’s shoulder. ‘If the Rabbi is being attacked then what of the other Jews? She fears for Josef and Margot’s safety. I fear we must worry for all our Jewish friends tonight.’

It gave Elsa no comfort to see that her parents were as terrified as she was — and yet, to her eternal shame, she couldn’t prevent the thought that she was relieved that she was not Jewish and the mob was not coming for them.

A downstairs window broke, making them all jump. Their terror, which had been receding, returned with vengeance.

‘They are coming for us!’ wailed her mother.

‘Elsa, comfort your mother,’ said her father, moving towards the stairs.

‘Where are you going?’

His face reddened in shame. ‘To tell them they have the wrong house.’

Elsa listened to her father descend the stairs and open the door, greeting the brick thrower with the obligatory ‘Heil Hitler’.

It did much to cool the heated exchange that followed.

Within minutes her father had locked the door and called for Otto’s help to drag a large chest across it.

They returned to Elsa’s bedroom together.

‘They have Rabbi Rozenblum,’ said Elsa, unable to drag her eyes from the scene. ‘He looks so scared. So fragile.’

‘Don’t watch, Elsa,’ warned her mother.

Her father hurriedly dragged the curtain closed. ‘We should all go to bed. They will not bother us tonight. I have seen to that.’

‘How?’ asked her mother.

Unable to meet their eyes, he cajoled his wife back to their bedroom. ‘I’ve put a sign on our door. They won’t bother us again.’

He did not need to explain. When Elsa had been but a child, signs denouncing the Jewish community had begun to appear.

At first they had been alarming, but years of rhetoric had by now dulled people to such hatred.

Anyone who dared to voice concerns was quickly silenced.

It was second nature, now, to talk of German — ‘Aryan’ — superiority, an idea that had by now crept into every part of their lives.

Many had learned to accept the unacceptable.

And those who continued to feel uneasy, like Elsa and her family, soon found they were outnumbered .

. . and could be viewed as disloyal. So they had fallen silent many years ago and solemnly watched life change.

Her father’s sign might save them tonight, but the shame of it would burn for ever. They were failing the Rabbi tonight and Elsa felt it more keenly than them all. She retreated from the closed curtain.

Once he was sure their parents were back in their own room, Otto crept back to the curtain and twitched it open again.

‘What is happening?’ Elsa asked, unsure if she wanted to really know.

‘They have cut off the Rabbi’s beard and are taking him somewhere.’ His sad tone told her more than his carefully selected words.

‘Tell me when they have gone.’

She watched her brother’s eyes, his fair brows knotted in deep concern, follow the street towards the river. Finally, he looked at her, a sheen of unshed tears in his eyes. ‘It’s all right. They have gone now.’

Elsa came to stand beside him. The street below had quietened, but the threatening murmur of the mob, led, encouraged and inflamed by the Brownshirts, could still be heard.

Their gazes lifted to a red glow lighting up the sky in the distance.

‘They have set the synagogue on fire,’ she whispered, horrified.

She watched the pulsing blaze grow. The scene blurred with her unshed tears, morphing into a brushstroke of blood red reaching high into the night sky.

She heard a tortured gasp and realized it had come from her. How could this be happening?

Otto picked up a pencil and paper and began to draw.

Elsa frowned at him. ‘How can you draw at a time like this, Otto?’

His gaze darted from Gollnow’s rooftops to the paper, his pencil feverishly sketching the plume of smoke filtering up from the blaze. ‘That is why I draw. To capture a moment. Tonight I want this moment. So we don’t forget.’

‘I’ll never forget.’

‘You will be forced to forget. But we mustn’t.’

More glass broke outside, splintering the air.

‘So many Jews have fled Gollnow already. When will it be enough?’ she whispered. ‘How can people behave this way?’

‘Because they believe in what they are doing.’