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.”