the same newspaper clippings that were shown before we felt obligated to invade Czechoslovakia,” Christine exclaimed.
The maid, we all knew, was listening.
Christine did not care; she loudly predicted future calamities.
The next morning, newspapers and a blaring radio in the center of town announced that the Poles had attacked a German radio station across the German-Polish border. The following day, the first of September, at 4:30 A.M., German tanks rolled into Poland.
Two days later, Abel came home in midmorning.
“Call, call the French consul . . . now,” he said with such urgency that I asked no questions.
We had no phone, but the lawyer who lived on the second floor had let us use his phone before. I rushed downstairs. The housekeeper, her eyes red from weeping, opened the door.
“My mother came from Poland,” she said as she let me in.
The telephone rang long and shrill in the empty shell of the French consulate.
I dialed again and again. An icy clamp tightened around my heart. My country had declared war on my husband’s country, as it had said it would if Germany attacked Poland.
XII
Memories of these long-past days are like singed photographs retrieved from the ruins of a house that has burned down. Oddly estranged, they still make me shudder.
Abel and I, sitting on a bench in a darkening park, tears running down our faces. Passersby look down at us. Very un-German indeed, to weep in public. I still remember what I was seeing through my tears: flames devouring all things dear to me, from Chartres’s cathedral to my grandmother’s house with its thatched roof.
I, dwarfed and alone, walking under a hundred giant streamers—blood-red with black swastikas in a white circle—floating down Stuttgart’s tall stone buildings in celebration of a bloody victory over the hapless Poles.
Abel and I, standing under golden autumn trees, plotting how to get hold of younger brother’s gun. We needed a gun to end our own unbearable lives.
And then there was Abel’s white-haired mother saying that things are never as bad as one imagines. She must have known. No, she did not, we said.
Christine, eyes flashing, asking, “What did I tell you?”
Her calm husband, shaking his head, telling us, “The French are too smart to want to die for Poland.”
Maybe that was true. Days passed, and France and England, who had declared war, were not invading Germany as expected. One week passed, and Poland was crushed. One week! Russia lost no time in grabbing a large chunk of the vanquished country.
In the history book I had had in grade school, there was a picture I had not forgotten: Frederick the Great, king of Prussia, Catherine the Great, empress of Russia, and Maria-Theresa, archduchess of Austria, tearing apart a map of Poland.
This had happened in the eighteenth century. Was it Poland’s fate to be torn apart by its neighbors?
We were all awed by the swiftness of the German victory. But of course, Poland was such a backward country. The Poles had attacked the mighty German tanks on horseback, with lances!
On October 6, in a long speech, Hitler made a formal proposal for peace. Most Germans, I think, believed he was sincere. Abel and I, bewildered as we were, hung on to every shred of hope. We knew that the information we were fed was truncated, biased, or false, yet what one hears often enough, one begins to believe.
“Lies, lies, lies,” Christine said. “Some truths even are lies in disguise. French and English people don’t want war, Hitler says. Do people of any country ever want to have their lives disrupted, their homes destroyed, their sons killed? The Germans don’t want war either. Yet, we will get a big war. Hitler has tasted blood . . . he wants more of it.”
We refused to be as pessimistic as Christine. Winter had come. Nothing had happened. Nothing would happen. The world was listening to reason.
XIII
One morning in late November, the lawyer’s housekeeper knocked on my door. She had good news for me, she said. She had been downtown shopping and had heard that one could now send letters to England and France.
“Take your letter to the post office,” she added. “I think you’ll need special stamps.”
All communications with England and France had been cut after the declaration of war and, as far as I knew, were still cut. But I was only too ready to believe any good news. I had been worried about my parents and my friends. They, no doubt, imagined that I was incarcerated, perhaps mistreated.
I rushed home to write a reassuring letter. I was well and free to go wherever I wanted to, I wrote. Everybody was as nice and as helpful as before. I hoped that peace would prevail; nobody I knew in Germany wanted war against France, I wrote.
At the post office, the employee to whom I handed my letter said, besides an emphatic, “Nein!” something I could not understand. He did not understand my bad German either.
A large woman standing by offered help. Towering over me, she explained, in simple German, that I had been misinformed. No, no letter could be sent to France. She felt so sorry for me, she said. She assured me that no German man wanted to fight against any French man. She would like so much to help me, she said, but she did not know how.
We walked side by side for a while. Suddenly she said, “If I were you, I would go to the radio station and just ask permission to read my letter on the radio.”
What a good idea! The helpful woman gave me directions, I thanked her, and I was on my way.
At the radio station, a doorkeeper directed me to a polite, well-groomed young gentleman in civilian clothes who spoke French and was eager to help. Would I leave my letter with him? he asked. Yes, I would. He promised I would hear from him shortly.
That evening, I told Abel about all I had accomplished by myself in just one half day.
If he had any misgivings, he did not say.
One day later, I was assigned, by telegram, a late-evening appointment at the radio station. I went alone, taking with me another letter I had written to my friends. At the radio station, the polite gentleman was beaming as he told me that I was welcome to read any letters I would like.
I stood alone in a large, dark room, in front of a microphone, and read my letters.
Because of the darkness and the silence, but mostly because of the late hour, I thought that this was direct broadcasting. I imagined my voice traveling through the vast darkness and reaching my father and my mother in the old house where I had lived the happiest days of my childhood with my beloved grandparents.
To make sure I would reach them, I would have to repeat the reading, I thought. But no, the polite gentleman said, this should do for the moment.
Of course, what I had done were recordings that would be played day and night, I soon discovered. We had no radio, but all the people we knew
