Under the Same Stars by Libba Bray(51)
In November, there was an attempt on Hitler’s life. An explosion at a beer hall in Berlin where the Führer had just given a speech. Two days later, someone tossed a petrol bomb through the front window of a house belonging to Kleinwald’s last remaining German Jewish family, the Schafers. They had refused to sell their business—a dress shop—when the Arisierung laws had dictated that no Jews could own businesses. A note had been pinned to their dress shop window blaming them and all Jews for the attack, even though it was known that the beer hall bomber, Georg Elser, wasn’t Jewish at all. Sophie’s mother brought the family some food and a blanket. “It isn’t much but at least it lets them know we care and don’t approve of what happened,” she told Sophie.
“But where will they go?” Sophie asked her parents. Herr Schafer’s application for a visa to Switzerland had been denied. He could not leave Germany.
“I’ve heard there is family in Essen,” her father said, but he didn’t say it with conviction.
The next morning, the Schafers were gone. Soldiers had come for them before dawn and marched them to a truck. They had not even been able to keep the blanket, which was returned to Sophie’s mother. “They have been relocated” was all the officer said. Members of the Women’s Auxiliary had marched into their abandoned shop and rummaged through clothing, hats, jewelry, and shoes. Klara and Lotte’s mother held up a beautifully tailored coat with a golden fox-fur collar that had once belonged to the Schafers’ eldest daughter, Sarah. She handed it to Klara. “Well. It would be a shame to let it go to waste.”
There was a whispered story making the rounds that the relocation and labor camps were actually death camps. That behind the iron gates and barbed wire fences, people were being slaughtered. Sophie had even heard whisperings from one of her father’s former commune friends that the smoke belching from the ovens was not from industry; it was a crematorium. When Sophie looked out at the rain-soaked houses, the people scurrying across puddles under umbrellas calling “Moin! Moin!” to one another, she couldn’t imagine such a thing taking place. Not here in Germany.
There was other unsettling news. One of the young mothers in town had taken her little girl to the hospital. The girl had been born with a condition of the heart—“a defect,” as the doctor put it. A few days later, the girl died. The doctors told the mother that it was from natural causes, but the grief-stricken mother insisted that her daughter had been killed for being “a life unworthy of life.”
“She was worthy to me,” the mother cried. “She was worthy.”
Sophie was changing. Her body had taken on new curves; her face caught up to her eyes. When she walked to school, some of the older gentlemen now doffed their hats and smiled. She got her period at last. But unlike Hanna, Sophie enjoyed the sense of heaviness that weighted her each month. It made her feel even more connected to the earth and its rhythms of shedding and rebirth, to the cycles of the sun and moon and stars, and she thought that instead of calling it a “curse,” they should call it what it was: magic.
Christmas came but it was hard to celebrate. The shop windows glittered with precious gifts that no one could afford with their meager ration points, and even if they could, what was in the window was just for show. No factories were making silk stockings or toys. All production went to the war effort now. Every Christmas, Sophie and Hanna had given each other some small token—an apple or an acorn from the forest. This would be the first Christmas without each other.
On Christmas Eve, Karl ducked into the bookshop wearing his uniform, home from the front. He was thinner and the blue of his eyes had dimmed somewhat. Perhaps that was what happened when you had seen war; it took the innocence from your eyes first. Sophie’s heart fluttered a bit but she refused to be anything but professional.
“May I help you?” Sophie said. I am beyond a girlish crush. See? See how beyond it I am?
“How are you, Sophie?”
“I’m well, thank you,” Sophie replied crisply.
“I see that. You grew up.”
Sophie didn’t know if this was a compliment or not. “Yes. I’m fifteen now.”
Karl could not seem to keep his fingers still. Sophie had never known Karl to be a nervous type.
“May I help you find something?” she said, kindlier this time, and for a moment, Karl looked at her in a way that she couldn’t interpret, as if she had asked a question she didn’t know she’d asked, one that he was now answering inside his head.
“I was looking for Siddhartha.”
Was Karl testing her? Did he mean to report her?
“Hermann Hesse has been very critical of the Führer,” Sophie said cagily.
Karl smiled wanly. “I know. I think I might have been at the bonfire when they burned his books. But I heard your father talking about Siddhartha once. It intrigued me. I wondered if perhaps he has a personal copy you might loan me?”
Her father did have a personal copy. He kept it in a secret library in the storeroom stacked behind a row of Reich-accepted books. Sophie’s father was of the belief that people should be allowed to read anything they wished.
“Just a moment,” Sophie said. She slipped into the storeroom and returned with her father’s personal copy of Siddhartha. “Just make sure to return it before you leave for the front again.”