I found Gisela sitting on the doorstep, resting her forehead in her palm. She gave me a miserable look.
“What is it?”
“Look,” she muttered. “It’s not just the kids at school who hate us. It’s everyone.”
Jürgen was at the side of the road, standing with Claudia and Klaus. Several other neighbors had come out of their houses too to see what the commotion was about. It was a beautiful day—blue skies and bright sunshine.
But no one was looking up at the sky because everyone was staring at the road. I left Gisela on the doorstep and went to see what the fuss was, but my heart sank as I came closer.
In crude red letters almost as high as the narrow road, someone had painted the word NAZIS. The graffiti had been carefully positioned right at the mouth of the street—centered right in front of our house.
“I can sort this out—you head into that safety protocol workshop,” Jürgen told Karl as I approached. “But, Claudia, since Sofie isn’t quite up to speed with American road rules, would you mind driving Gisela to school with Mila?”
Jürgen gave her a hopeful look. Claudia muttered something under her breath about it being the first and last time, but the next thing we knew, she was backing out of her driveway with Gisela in the back seat.
I called Avril to postpone our coffee to the next morning. She was horrified when I told her about the graffiti, and her reaction reassured me. Some Americans were kind—even supportive. After I hung up, Jürgen called the police. I sat in the living room with Felix and listened to his side of the conversation.
“…right out the front of my house—that’s at 1401 Beetle Avenue, sir…Yes, it says ‘Nazi’…I’m not sure what you mean…Well, no, sir…Actually, yes, I did think you would come to—I see. Is defacing public property not a crime in this country?…No, no. I understand. Yes, okay. Thank you. Fine.”
He came to the door of the living room, his expression grim.
“What are they going to do?” I asked.
“Officer Johnson said if it was bothering me, I could paint over it,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief.
“Aren’t they coming to investigate?”
Jürgen unwound his bow tie as he shook his head.
“But…why not? This is harassment!”
“The police officer said it’s to be expected, given the circumstances,” Jürgen muttered bitterly. “He suggested I might want to buy the paint in bulk so I’ve got some ready for next time.”
20
Lizzie
El Paso, Texas
1935
Henry and I sold everything we could at a yard sale and bought bus tickets to El Paso. We arrived on a blustery spring day in 1935, just a week after we buried our parents, and checked into a rooming house, with every little thing we had left in the world neatly packed into two suitcases.
I’d never been to a city before. I’d seen photos in the newspaper, so I thought I knew what it would be like, but I wasn’t prepared for the sensory overload. Cars and trucks roared past us, people hurried by, store signs and street signs and clothing were all so bright. Even the air smelled wrong, like a tractor had just backfired right near me.
There was no time to say goodbye to the land we loved or to begin to mourn our parents, but as I found myself completely out of place, the immensity of the loss and the abruptness of the change all hit me at once. I hadn’t cried much other than the day Mother and Daddy left us. I didn’t even cry when Pastor Williams picked us up from the farm to take us to the bus stop. But it wasn’t car exhaust causing my eyes to sting as I looked around the tiny room Henry and I would be sharing. He set his suitcase on the bed and I set mine on the little sofa, staring down at it so Henry didn’t see the tears in my eyes.
“Lizzie,” he said gently, and when I composed myself and turned back to face him, he grinned and pointed to a string hanging from the roof. Back home, electric lights were only for the rich—but it was obvious that the rooming house wasn’t a place for rich people. I found the contradiction to be perplexing. I walked briskly across the room to tug the string. The light flickered on, so I pulled the string again, to turn it off, then repeated the process, momentarily distracted by the novelty.
“And indoor plumbing too,” Henry said, as he stretched out on the bed and crossed his arms beneath his head. “See? This is fine. And once I start working for the CCC, you’ll have this room all to yourself.”
Henry was convinced he’d find work in the city, all because of an article he’d read in the newspaper about Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps—the CCC. He was only a few months away from twenty-five, and as far as we could tell, the program was only for young men up to twenty-five. But Henry “had a good feeling” they’d take him anyway.