Page 10 of The Berlin Sisters
‘I wish I could help, I wish I could offer assistance, but—’
‘You cannot help us?’ her father interrupted. ‘You mean to say there’s nothing that will be done? That this violence will be tolerated?’
‘I cannot intervene,’ the policeman said, sadly, putting his hat back on his head. ‘If I do, I’ll lose my job, and I have a family to take care of. They’ll only do the same to me as they’ve done to you.’
Eliana blinked away her own tears as she saw her father’s shoulders slump, as she recognised the defeat in his expression. Was this to be their life now?
As the policeman walked away, telling them one last time how sorry he was, a rock landed near Eliana, hitting the fallen glass on the ground. Before she knew what was happening, another rock was thrown, this one hitting her father on the side of his head, causing blood to slide down his skin, staining the collar of his shirt.
‘They can’t do this to us!’ David cried, pushing past Eliana as a group of young men, barely older than her brother, pelted another rock at them before moving on to the store beside theirs as they jeered. ‘Someone has to stop them!’
‘No!’ their father said, grabbing hold of David’s arm, his head still bleeding. ‘No, we stay quiet. We keep our heads down until it’s safe enough to go back to the apartment.’
‘Father, we cannot—’
‘We will be dead before the end of the day if you retaliate, so we will do nothing,’ he said firmly. ‘We will find any valuables here, I have some antique jewellery hidden in a safe, and then we will make a plan.’
‘A plan?’
‘To leave Germany,’ her mother said. ‘We cannot stay here, it’s not safe.’
‘Herr Goldman!’ came a cry from outside. ‘Herr Goldman, are you in there?’
Maria Schwabe, the wife of her father’s friend Thomas, was cowering near the front of their store, and Eliana watched as her mother quickly ushered her inside.
‘Thomas has been taken,’ she cried, her body folded inwards as she clutched a shawl around her shoulders. ‘They came into ourapartment last night, stormtroopers with guns, and they held a revolver to his head as they smashed everything. Everything!’
‘Where is he now?’ her father asked. ‘Maria, where have they taken him?’
‘I don’t know,’ she cried. ‘But they’re coming for all the men, they’re rounding them all up, and they say they won’t stop until they’ve damaged every last store and every home. Until they’ve gotten rid of the lot of us.’
Eliana looked to David, who moved closer to her, his hand finding hers again. He’d been right about them needing to keep their father safe, but she had a feeling that she needed to keep him safe, too.
‘We could send the children to the orphanage,’ her mother said. ‘They could seek refuge there, to keep them safe for now.’
‘Mother, no!’ Eliana cried. ‘I won’t leave you.’
‘Maria, gather your children, we shall take them there at once.’
‘I’m not leaving you, either,’ David said. ‘I’m not a child any more, and I won’t have our family separated.’
It was their father who turned to them, looking at each of them, his usually bright eyes dull. ‘We shall search for anything of value, and you should do the same in your store, Maria. Hide what you can on your body, and get your children to as well. But we will not leave the children at the orphanage with no protection. If they’ve razed the synagogue to the ground, then they may do the same to the orphanages, too.’
No one argued with her father as he turned and ambled over the shards of glass and broken timber to the back of the shop, appearing to have aged twenty years overnight. Everything he’d worked so hard for had been destroyed, but Eliana knew that he wouldn’t give up without a fight, that he would find every last item of value. Her father was the hardest-working, proudest man sheknew; she only hoped that he’d be strong enough to survive what was to come.
A wail from outside sent her mother running to the open door to see what had happened, but Eliana stayed behind, feeling safer inside the store than out, even though she knew the stormtroopers with bats and guns could come back down the street at any moment.
‘The orphanages have all been burned to the ground. They’re gone!’ someone cried. ‘Our rabbi was beaten to death as he tried to stop them!’
A shiver ran the length of Eliana’s spine and her mother began to cry. David angrily kicked broken glass aside as he followed their father. If even the synagogues and orphanages had been torched, what hope did any of them have to stay safe?
‘We shall go home then,’ her father said, calling from the back of the store.
‘Home?’ she whispered to David. ‘How can we go home? What if they come for us there? Won’t that be the very first place they look?’
Her mother began nodding, as if she couldn’t stop, as if it were out of her control. ‘We should go home. Yes, we should go home. We will be safe there, we shall lock the doors and hide, wait for all this to be over.’
‘But, Mama—’
