Chapter One #2
Otto was just sixteen, two years younger than her, but he had an old philosopher’s head on his shoulders and an artist’s soul — and despite living with him all her life, knowing how he felt, Elsa was unsure if there would ever come a time he would publicly voice his true beliefs.
To the outside world he lived the life of a good German.
He had no Jewish friends and she had never heard him say anything against Hitler outside the home.
But then, it had not been safe to speak against the Führer for years.
He saw her staring at him. ‘They believe for the same reason we watch and do nothing,’ he said simply.
She looked out of the window one last time, a mixture of feelings tearing at her heart.
Relief that they were safe, shame that she felt that way, confusion at how it had come to this, hope that it would not get worse, but most strong of all was the realization that somehow their lives had changed for the worse.
Her brother turned the page over and began drawing again.
Elsa turned away. ‘I’m going to try to get some sleep. I have work in the morning. I’ll leave you to your drawing.’
Sickened by the night’s events, she hid under the covers, glad her brother was nearby but angry at him for his composure.
The mob had moved away. The sign still hung on the door.
Their father had probably been recognized as the local stationmaster, a job given to him by the Nazi Party itself.
They would know that his wife was Gretchen Kalbach, who helped support the activities of the local Bund Deutscher M?del, the Hitler Youth for girls.
His daughter, he would have told them, had been a loyal member and, at the age of eighteen, had only recently left.
She was now training to be a teacher, ensuring her pupils said ‘Heil Hitler’ many times a day.
She had to, for not doing so would signal that she was anti-Nazi and she would lose her job.
The Kalbach family could sleep safe in their beds tonight, she told herself, while a voice in her head screamed that their Jewish neighbours had nowhere to hide.
And her family, including herself, were accepting this.
How had it come to this? she asked herself again.
She closed her eyes. She knew how it had happened.
She had lived it, after all. Her childhood had been set against the background of ruinous inflation, high unemployment and political instability.
She had been born only two years after Germany had been defeated in the Great War.
The German people had lost their self-respect, both individually and as a country.
Elsa was a child at the time but she still remembered seeing her father queuing for hours to collect his unemployment benefit among a crowd of equally disheartened men.
She listened to conversations that other children found too boring: heated discussions in the night between parents, between neighbours.
Despite her young age, she came to understand that people were desperate for someone to lead them out of their misery.
The older generation wanted stability; the younger generation wanted change.
Hitler had promised them both. He had told them he would lead their nation to greatness and would serve and glorify Germany and its people.
It was what her father and mother had wanted to hear.
And, as she grew older, it was what she wanted too.
When she was only ten years old she was one of the first to join the Bund Deutscher M?del.
It was promoted as a safe, fun place to go, where sports and games were encouraged and past political differences, which had pitted family against family, were put aside.
Elsa and her friends thought they had found a place where everyone believed in Germany but where politics had no place — at least, that was what they were told.
What they believed. Nazi Party parades and marches brought colour and excitement to their lives, along with pride.
People began to enjoy themselves again. Germany was once again respected and dynamic.
When Elsa was almost sixteen, in 1936, the country had hosted the Olympic Games.
No more shame at losing the Great War, no longer suffering the disrespect and punishments meted out by the rest of Europe.
At last life was good, just as Hitler had promised them.
Yet all was not good. She could see that now, though at the time she had not.
Her fair hair and blue eyes were hailed as the perfect ‘Aryan’ look.
Aryan — an old word to signal a new dawn.
As a young child she was considered pale, mouselike and ordinary, but in her teens she was envied for her appearance.
It was a heady elixir to gorge upon and helped her to feel like she belonged to something good, something wholesome, something groundbreaking and far bigger than her.
Yet as her fortunes rose, others’ began to fall.
Jews were demonized and Jewish businesses boycotted.
Their everyday lives became limited by new discriminatory laws .
. . and it was accepted. By then Elsa and her friends had been taught to be wary of Jewish people, told they were untrustworthy, greedy.
Jews were blamed for all the ills of society.
Rumours spread of what happened to those who opposed the new regime, and terror grew.
Books that opened up the world in thought or documented the past were burned.
Students were taught not to question or be different and an undercurrent of mistrust was always present.
To speak out, to take heed of the ‘wrong’ information, was to be a traitor, an enemy.
Now, as a trainee teacher, Elsa was teaching her students the same rhetoric.
But for Elsa herself, the seeds of confusion and doubt were planted.
How could these changes be as moral, as right, as people said?
Those seeds had lain dormant in the dark just waiting for rain to start them growing.
And it was tonight that she acknowledged the shame she had felt, the fear that had been growing insidiously.
Her mother had once said, ‘We only see the true man when he is given enough power to take.’ Her beloved Führer had complete power over his people and now he had set his sights elsewhere.
Only months before, he had announced a union between Germany and Austria.
What else was he capable of? Perhaps next time a country would not welcome his presence.
The noise of the riot lasted into the small hours.
Eventually she fell into a fitful sleep, waking with a start as the morning sunlight began to shift across her face.
She sat up and looked around, reassured to see her familiar bedroom was the same.
The dressing table she’d inherited from her grandmother still proudly displayed her brush, her first bottle of perfume and a trinket box she’d received as a Christmas gift from her mother.
The small bookshelf in the corner, made by her father for her fourteenth birthday, filled with an eclectic selection of books.
Some from her childhood, many she had read, and a small collection she had yet to read.
Everything looked the same, just how it had been before the horrors of last night.
It should have been comforting, but it felt wrong.
Otto must have gone back to his own room at some point in the night.
She sat up straighter and saw that in his place he had left a drawing.
She scrambled across the bed and picked it up.
It was of a young woman’s face, with the flawless skin, glossy hair and wide clear eyes of youth.
Was this how Otto saw her? She was pretty, yet there was no mistaking that it was her.
She was gazing off to the distance, as if hopeful for the future, yet the longer Elsa stared at it, the more she saw the deeper sorrow in her eyes.
Otto, with his exquisite eye for detail, had captured more than her features caressed by moonlight, he had captured her thoughts, her emotions and the pivotal moment when all her hopes and dreams had died.
In the bottom right-hand corner, Otto, who drew to memorialize change, had scrawled ‘Elsa,’ with a satisfied flare.