T HE LITTLE SWISS TOWN of St. Gall is very near the German frontier. And Mrs. M., who has come out of Germany especially to speak to me, is to meet me here. I park my little Ford in the square; a huge car, a magnificent pale Mercedes in front of the hotel, catches my attention — dusty, just come from Germany, from Munich, as the license-plates show. Its number is conspicuously low, the number of a government official. I feel uncomfortable at the sight. Mrs. M. shouldn’t even be speaking to me. It’s daring to receive me, even in a friendly hotel on neutral ground; she could be arrested for it when she returns to Munich. For haven’t I been guilty of high treason — or at least what they call high treason over there? Haven’t I failed to show the respect due the gentlemen of the Third Reich? Haven’t I chosen to leave their rule rather than accept it — to get out, go anywhere to escape the whiff of blood — Prague, Amsterdam, New York, St. Gall?
I look around for an owner for the Mercedes, and to make sure that no one has recognized me. But, in the still noon, the hotel square is deserted. I take heart, run past the doorman, up the wide old staircase to Room 14. Mrs. M. wishes to speak to me, in spite of the danger and although she does not know me personally. I knock, and she opens the door.
She is tall and blonde — a slim, strong woman with blue-gray eyes, a little bridge of freckles across her nose, and tanned bare arms. In her light linen dress, she looks like the perfect advertisement for a summer resort.
“I almost imagined that was your car,” I begin, “—the official one in front.”
She starts a little.
“An official car?” she repeats, and, very low, “Did you give your name downstairs?”
She has the nervous habit of looking about furtively, as if there might be people under the bed, past the curtains, behind the door. It is a phobia of those who come out of Nazi Germany.
“Returning today?” I ask.
Yes, she is. This is a day trip; they expect her home.
Now that we are speaking, we close the windows without a word and in perfect accord, this woman from Germany and I.
She has the Southern accent that I love. And she will be able, surely, to tell me about Munich, my native city, my childhood home that I have not seen for over four years. Sometimes in dreams I wander in its streets, or float dreaming over the Marienplatz, across the old section of the town, down towards the Isar River.
But Mrs. M. and I have things to discuss; no time for emotional excursions into dream cities.
She has stayed in Germany. No reason to leave; she and her husband are both all-Aryan. Her husband a well-paid physician; they have a pleasant apartment, a decent existence.
“As a matter of fact, it’s not a decent one,” she says. “It’s degrading. But what are we to do?”
Of course, Dr. M. is a member of the Party and of the Reich Medical Association, and of the Fachschaft (the Nazi professional union) — he must be, to exist. I needn’t ask about that.
“And you? Do you belong to any of the women’s unions ( Kammeradinnenschaften)?”
“Woman’s place is in the home,” she quotes her Führer’s inspired, living phrase.
And then laughs and admits that she is a semi-official personage in Munich.
“I’m blessed not only with a perfect Nordic long-and-narrow skull,” she goes on, “but I have the precisely correct pelvic measurements too, the desired bust, and the prescribed breadth of hip. The gentlemen on the Board of Health examined and tested, felt and measured everything, and found it all just about perfect. Then they photographed me, and listed the figures on the picture; and, all year, I’ve had the honor of gracing the calendar. The perfect brood-mare, recommended by the State! It would be funny enough, if it weren’t so sad, and so disgusting,” she adds, and the officially tested-and-photographed, guaranteed-genuine Nordic mouth is smiling wryly.
“And now you want to leave? After all this time, why?”
She opens her little bag, and pulls out a leather case. “This is why,” she says, unfolding the leather photograph frame, with its six pictures.
I look at the baby in his poses, laughing, shouting, crying, waving his hand, making a little fist. “His name is Franz,” his mother says, setting the frame up, on the table before us.
“I beg your pardon,” I venture, “but I don’t quite understand. Is it because of him that you want to leave? But your little Franz is an Aryan; everything will be easy for him, all doors opened. You see, we on the outside aren’t so much in favor of emigration,” I have to add, seeing her surprise. “It’s worse than you expect when you go away — harder, less friendly — and then, we think — you will understand — that those who can stay in the Reich safely should stay. Especially if they are not in accord with the godforsaken brainlessness about them. “It is so important that a little intelligence and reason should remain within the country.”
I look away from the pictures. But Mrs. M. is speaking without her hesitation, now — volubly, clearly, her smooth forehead lined by two deep lines of anger and decision.
“No,” she disagrees, “he wouldn’t have an easy time at all — he would be miserable. Reason! I’ve had four years of that, and I’m through with that kind of reason. I can’t even get chicken soup for the child, or stewed fruit, or a good broth. There’s no chance of buying reasonable food in those war-camps of cities. Not even hominy!” she cries, “nor rice!” accusingly. “There’s a shortage of eggs today, and tomorrow it will be butter. And it’s so much worse all the time — everything’s grown worse in four-and-a-half years — food, clothing, laws and spies. No one lives in safety in our country.” She shakes her head indignantly. “Not even the most harmless people know what it’s like not to be in constant danger — of arrest at any moment, denounced by anyone who finds it worth his while, for some unfortunate remark he may or may not have made. If my husband has to press a Nazi patient for his bill, we live in fear of his saying we’ve made fun of the Führer, or joked about the Minister of Propaganda. And if that happens, we’ll both be arrested with no one to ask why — and our son would have to manage for himself.”
I like her, standing beautiful and defiant, looking down at the pictures of her son who will have to manage, and who cannot have his hominy, and will not have his rice tomorrow. I pretend to know less than I do, and seem more ignorant to find out what this woman really thinks and feels. I need to discover the reason driving her out of her country after four-and-a-half years of “reason.” So I tell her that I know she is unhappy and worried by material lacks. But it isn’t so different from wartime. “I was a child during the War,” I argue, “we really had hardly a thing to eat, but we were gay, alert children.”
Mrs. M. interrupts me here. Her voice trembles with impatience. “What are you talking about? As if you didn’t know the difference! As if you didn’t know how sensible things were, comparatively, during the War! Germany was really threatened then, from the outside, and we did without things then for a good and sufficient reason. But now, in peacetime, so that we may threaten and bluster and our fine Herr Führer may rattle his saber and act like a madman until the world is in panic? Really, it isn’t the lack of butter that makes me decide — it’s all the other things. I want the child to become a human being, a good and decent man who knows the difference between lies and truth, aware of liberty and dignity and true reason, not the opportunistic reason ‘dictated by policy’ which turns black white if it’s useful at the moment. I want the boy to become a decent human being — a man and not a Nazi!”
Our drinks arrive: gentian brandy, from the big healthful mountain gentians — tasting like the meadows and pastures of the mountain country that is our home country, this woman’s and mine.
“To the young gentleman,” I drink the toast, “to Junker Franz — may he become a human being!”
We will have to go, soon; she, so simply, back to Munich (I feel it in the pit of my stomach and in my knees), and I “home” to Zurich, where my parents are now living. But I want to hear more from her, and the afternoon is advancing. I pretend ignorance, a little ashamed to be asking her questions that are not entirely frank, ashamed to subject her to these questions, now that her angry determined look has passed, in this late light, to helplessness and tenderness and perplexity before the meanness and injustice she is remembering. I ask her how much she can expect to influence Franz when he is a little older. She has admitted that she is afraid of the schools’ influence — the new schools, which teach that the German people are 100,000,000 strong (generously including all the German-speaking population, Dutch, Austrian, Polish, or even American), and that one is German by the grace of God and the State, and in God’s name by the grace of the Führer of the Third Reich and his Archangels, the Leaders of the Third Reich.
She expects nothing.
“There’s no influence possible,” she tells me. “It isn’t only school, it’s the Hitler Youth Group, enforced camp life, Wehrsport — sport whose purpose is to teach defense from martial attack — and by then Franz will come home, saluting with his hand up. Then, if I suggest that he go and do his lessons, he’ll say, ‘But I’m going to target-practice!’ And if I tell him he’ll never learn anything that way, with those bad manners, he can denounce me. And, at first, I shall only be warned.”
“And what about religion?” I ask, knowing the answer as I speak, “Won’t his religious teachers affect him?”
The answer is that the best of them will be in concentration camps, under the pretexts of rape, robbery, or having sold their stamp collections into foreign countries (which is punishable by death). But she tells me a story instead:
“A friend of mine, a girl from school, married very young, right after graduation. She married a Jew. And her son, Wolfgang, who is seven now, is a half-Jew. I asked her how he was the other day; and she said, ‘He’s fine — a little better today, really; at least the sun’s not out.’ I didn’t understand at all. She had to explain: ‘On fine days, all the other boys play in the yard — and then he cries because he can’t play with them—of course he can’t, he’s half-Jewish.’ The mother was quite calm as she said that,” Mrs. M. finishes, “but I won’t forget her face as she said ‘… at least the sun’s not out.’” She looks away. “And Franz, growing up, will be among the boys, true Christians, in brown shirts, playing in the yard, while little Wolfgang cries and cries.”
Mrs. M. is drawn up tall again, defiant and hard. “I’d rather have the right to comfort that boy when he cries, than not to have the right to slap my own son for that kind of revolting cruelty!” That is the alternative, the one choice of rights that is left.
She adds: “Have you any idea what a great man Wolfgang’s father was, before the government changed? He was a physician and surgeon — my husband’s superior at the hospital. Just after Hitler came in, they had an emergency operation, a little ‘Aryan’ boy with appendicitis. Peritonitis had begun; it was a matter of life and death, you see, and the Professor, who still held his post, was performing the operation himself. And in the silence of the operating room, deep under the anaesthetic, the child began to scream, suddenly, shouting phrases cut so deep into his soul that they remained even during the death under ether. ‘Down with the Jews!’ he cried out, ‘Kill the Jews, we have to get rid of them!’ My husband tells me that moment gripped him — the calm Jewish Professor, going steadily on with the operation, the knife not trembling, everything going ahead to save that screaming child. And, really, on the other side, a thing like that is far worse than any humiliation for a child, far uglier, more hopeless. It drives me mad to think that my son might ever be able to turn to death and murder in his sleep, because he had been taught to do so, and because I had no right to stop that teaching. I don’t think that could happen to me — it’s unreal, a nightmare; but it has the power of a nightmare, weighing on my chest, sitting at my head night and day; it tortures me until I weep; and when I sleep it cuts off my breath. But, profoundly in me, I know — as we know in dreams — it isn’t true, I shall never let it go that far, I shall see that my son is brought up differently. He must never pass, on the way to school, those newspaper stands, where the Stürmer is up with all its obscenities; he must never define Rassenschande (the intermarriage or mingling of Jews and Aryans), nor the best ways of doing away with the French, the Jews and the students of the Bible. Let him learn what is right, not what is expedient; let him learn something of use in his life, and not spend all his time at target-practice. Then he won’t denounce me, he will be quite fond of me and listen to what I tell him, when we speak. And he will love and serve the country we live in then; but he will know, too, that the love of freedom and justice comes before everything.”
Outside, it has begun to rain, an almost invisible small drizzle that darkens the little room Mrs. M. of Munich has rented for the day in the hotel at St. Gall. My car is open, and I realize, in a corner of my mind past all these thoughts, that I shall have to sit on wet leather….
But we still have a few details to go over. Mrs. M. is handing me her husband’s papers — copies of all his certificates, diplomas going back into his childhood. His high-school diploma is touching to me, now that it is given to an unknown person so that it may speak for him somewhere, across some ocean.
“Professor X. in Y. knows about us,” says the woman, “he seems to be slightly interested…. Here is a letter of recommendation from Geheimrat S. — I thought that might help.”
“Of course. Yes.” I nod hopefully, but I hear my own voice, a little uncertain as I speak. “Surely it will…. I do hope for the best.”
And now we are saying goodby. Mrs. M. packs the photographs in the leather case. She holds a frame, waving to me with her other hand. “Auf Wiedersehen,” she calls, “Auf Wiedersehen … in freedom!”
“Yes,” I answer from the door, “Viel Glück — and may it be soon!”
* * *
Three weeks later I read that a physician and his wife have been arrested. Dr. M. of Munich has been placed in the concentration camp at Dachau; Mrs. M., in a Munich prison. They have often made derogatory remarks, it had been reported, about the construction program of the National Socialist regime. The son of this pair, Franz M., aged fourteen months — the paragraph concludes — has been committed to the State Children’s Home. In this manner, it is to be hoped, it may still be possible to make a good National Socialist out of the boy.