Chapter 37 Imminent Danger
Imminent Danger
Berlin
The war continued its slow march. German troops had been stalled in Stalingrad and had not been able to invade Moscow. It
seemed like the Nazis were no longer winning, but their mechanisms of death were still in full swing. Hitler had promised
that if Germany entered into total war, he would wipe out all the Jews in Europe. Berlin was no exception. Since the beginning
of the year, Jews had been rounded up en masse and deported to Auschwitz, Sobibor, and Treblinka.
In the months following Derek’s first cryptic note, Helene had managed to make contact with him.
She had been right about the address, and they had written countless letters.
Not all of them made it to their destination, but enough did that they could rest easier at night, knowing the other was alive and as safe as possible in the given circumstances.
Alexander and Matilde sent pictures and short notes, and Helene made up silly poems and stories for them.
She had tried every possible means of traveling to Konigsberg, but each option was a door slammed shut.
Helene caught wind of rumors that all the Jews in Berlin would soon be deported and sent off from the Grunewald train station.
Helene’s ID papers were not marked “Jew,” but her mother’s were, and Maria could be rounded up at any moment. The Nazis had
lists of all the homes where Jews lived.
One day Helene went to her parents’ house to try once again to convince them to come live with her at the house in the middle
of the forest. Gustav and Maria hardly ever ventured outdoors anymore, and Amalia was deathly pale.
“We can’t leave, Helene. Amalia is still in school . . .”
“Dad, the Nazis are going to take Mom. Don’t you see that?” She could not understand how blind the man was.
“Honey, I don’t want to leave your father,” Maria said. “We’ve been together for a lifetime, and I just don’t think it’s a
good idea to hide away. People say they send Jews to camps in Poland to work, or to the ghettos up there.”
“Mom, I’ve been in one of those camps. It’s, it’s . . . I can’t even tell you how terrible it is, and I was in one of the
better ones. Believe me, at your age, you won’t survive a week.”
Her mother shook her head. “We’re not leaving. But take your sister—she can still be saved. We’ve already lived long enough.
This war isn’t going to end anytime soon, and we won’t recognize the world that exists once it’s over. I really appreciate
what you’re trying to do, but we’re going to stay here.”
Helene clung to them, weeping and begging them to change their minds, but to no avail. Amalia sobbed the entire time she packed
her suitcase, saying, “No, no, I don’t want to go. I don’t want to leave you!”
“You’ve got to,” Maria said, wiping away the young woman’s tears as she did when Amalia was a child.
“We will live forever through you and Helene. God will preserve us in your memory, and one day he will make all things new, and we’ll be together with him forever.
This separation is only temporary. Your grandparents are already there waiting for us. We’ll be together again soon enough.”
It was unbelievably hard to give the very last hug and then walk away. They dragged Amalia’s heavy suitcase to the car and
loaded it into the trunk beside the cans of spare gasoline. Once Helene had found access to gas again, she had started keeping
several gallons in the car and at the house so she would never run out.
As she and Amalia drove away from their childhood neighborhood, Helene felt like her heart was being ripped apart. The buildings
and the streets were the same, but Berlin was an empty husk, its soul having been ripped out by the Nazis.
That very night the SS came for Helene’s parents. Neighbors later told Helene that the sergeant had told Gustav that they
were there only for Maria. He answered that he was going with his wife anywhere they were taking her. They set out for the
last journey of their life hand in hand, going down the stairs as calmly as if for a stroll to the park. The long walks they
had taken to coax Helene out of Maria’s womb, the back-and-forth journeys on foot to take their daughters to school and music
lessons, sitting peacefully on the porch in fall, the aroma of spring flowers—it all came flooding back as Gustav and Maria
mounted the back of the truck and joined a group of strangers under a green canvas roof and drove into the forever silence.
After the watershed conversation about the living library, Lena had taken charge of contacting the potential candidates.
It was a delicate matter that took time to complete.
The initial conversations were all about determining who had become Nazi sympathizers.
Most candidates, though, were political dissidents or religious people who could not tolerate the evil actions of the heartless regime.
Then she and Helene would hand deliver the books to be memorized.
Before returning a volume, the participants would recite its contents to them.
They divided longer texts into two or three parts.
That afternoon, two participants came to Lena’s house for a recitation. A young man stood, cleared his throat, and launched
into A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens:
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the
epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring
of hope, it was the winter of despair . . .”
Beside him, an elderly woman nodded along, waiting for her turn.
The young man took a break an hour later, and she continued where she had left off earlier that day with War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, when Princess Marya and Natásha tend to Prince Andrei on his deathbed:
“It was the last spiritual struggle between life and death, in which death gained the victory. It was the unexpected realization of the fact that he still valued life as presented to him in the form of his love for Natásha, and a last, though ultimately vanquished, attack of terror before the unknown.”
Over weeks and months, the participants committed hundreds of texts to memory, constructing a human library built of nerves,
muscles, and bones. In the brains of those brave resisters, one of the most important treasures of humanity was being painstakingly
safeguarded while humankind raced headlong into near-complete destruction.