Page 14 of The Berlin Sisters
‘You need to tell them, Papa,’ David said, as he sat down on the bed, his head hanging. ‘You need to tell them what else he said.’
‘Papa?’ Eliana asked. ‘What did he say?’
Her father was the one with tears shining in his eyes now, and he sat down beside his son, as if his legs could hold him no longer. ‘He said that there are terrible things happening to our people, that the violence has escalated. Some Jews have still been managing to emigrate, but he doesn’t know if we’ll be able to leave. He thinks it’s too late.’
‘So we are stuck here? We will have to live with this hatred forever?’
‘He fears that the Nazi ideology will spread through Europe quickly, that we must flee to America if we can. He doesn’t think we’ll be safe anywhere that Germany can reach.’
They all sat in silence for a moment, before Eliana stood. ‘I shall pack a bag, so I’m ready for tomorrow.’
Her father shook his head. ‘He said not to take anything. You are to appear as a friend from school, and you will walk fromthe building to the waiting car so that no one notices you. You mustn’t carry anything that could identify you or make you look suspicious.’
Eliana understood, but as she looked around the room, at all of their beautiful furniture and possessions, she wondered how they were to survive if they couldn’t have any reminders of who they were. Of who they’d once been.
‘We shall all keep jewellery on our bodies,’ her father instructed. ‘We will take everything we can, everything of value, so that we have something to sell, even if we have to hide it in our undergarments.’
They were all silent again, the uncertainty of their future hanging heavy. And Eliana couldn’t stop wondering if Herr Müller would keep his word and come back for the rest of her family, or if this might be the very last time they would all be together.
‘We must be strong,’ her father said. ‘Others have lost their lives, families have been ripped apart, but we are survivors. We will do whatever it takes to stay alive.’
‘David?’ Eliana said, looking to her brother, wishing they could both go together, finding the very idea of parting from him even harder than leaving her parents behind.
They’d been through so much – they’d walked to school together and held their heads high despite the jeers; they’d steadfastly continued their studies when they’d been forced to stay home; they’d whispered their plans for the future late at night, the countries they could move to, far away from Nazis – and now, after all of that, they were to be parted.
When their parents left the room, she went over to him, dropping to the floor beside the bed. He moved to sit beside her, their shoulders touching, knees bumping together.
‘He said that there are tens of thousands of men incarcerated,’ David whispered, ‘and that there is a new camp just for women, called Ravensbrück.’
‘What do they do there? Why do they take the women there?’
‘I don’t know. But he said he doesn’t think any of the women will ever come back, that it is a place of horrors.’
Fear tangled like a knot, nestled deep in her belly.
‘You must go, Eliana, and then you must fight for us. But you have to make sure he comes back for us, because I can’t be here for long without you, and we can’t let them take Mama to that camp. I would rather die than know that she was incarcerated there.’
‘I will never stop fighting for you, David,’ she said, throwing her arms around him and burying her face in his shoulder. ‘I will fight for you and for Mama and Papa until my very last breath.’
‘And I you,’ he said. ‘I would rather die than let anything happen to you.’
Chapter Six
AVA
‘I walked straight out the front door of our apartment block with Eliana, dressed in your Bund Deutscher Mädel uniform, Ava, and straight to Papa’s waiting car,’ Hanna said. ‘It was the first time I’d ever done anything like it, and it showed me what someone in our position, in our family’s position, could do to help others. Dressed in that uniform, no one batted an eye at us.’
‘I walked past two German SS officers who smiled at me and nodded their heads,’ Eliana said. ‘I’d prayed that I’d be invisible, and in the end I was the opposite of that. I was seen as one of them, because they couldn’t imagine I was anything other than a carefully vetted pure German in my beautiful uniform.’
Ava couldn’t believe it. She was speechless as she looked from Hanna to Eliana, finding it almost impossible to imagine that her sister had commandeered her full blue skirt and white blouse for such an elaborate ruse. She actually felt queasy thinking about it, trying to separate what she’d believed for so long with the truth of what was being told to her, but she still couldn’t stop imagining how she’d be thought of if anyone discovered that a Jewish girl had worn her prized BDM uniform. ‘What happened next? How did you get the rest of the family out of the city?’
‘Mama did a similar trick with Frau Goldman, a few weeks later,’ Hanna said. ‘She dressed her in her best clothes, and they both carried armfuls of knitted items and blankets, clearly destined for our soldiers at the front. No one would have dared question them.’
‘My father and brother weren’t so easy to disguise though,’ Eliana said. ‘It wasn’t until we were reunited that I learned your father had marched them from the apartment block with a revolver pointed to Papa’s head. It was the only way to move him, but it could so easily have gone wrong.’
Ava gasped, imagining the scene. ‘What didyoudo next?’ she asked her father. ‘Where did you take them from there?’ How had he taken them anywhere but to their deaths?
‘I told the SS men who were present that I wanted to take care of the Goldmans myself, for daring to live right under my nose, in my apartment block,’ Ava’s father told her. ‘I said awful things about them that were necessary as part of the ruse, and when we got to the park, I told them to run and fired my gun two times, to make it sound as if they’d been executed. But I’m not proud of the things Herr Goldman was witness to hearing, nor the compulsory hit to his head with the butt of my gun for effect.’
