Nazi Archives - Delphinium Books

There are lots of things I notice this Christmas that I’ve never noticed before. When my mother takes me shopping, for instance, which is only between the hours of three and five, there are certain village stores she will go into and certain stores she won’t. And the stores she will not enter are usually the smarter ones, the fish shop and the cooperative, for instance, which are near the best inns like Franzi Wimmer’s and have glossy portraits of the Führer prominently on show inside, while the shops she does enter are the cheaper ones, even the dirtier ones, like the baker whose bread is often stale and the dairy where the milk is often sour. They have pictures of the Führer on their walls too, of course, but smaller ones and not so often dusted. Some of them even have little specks of fly-shit on his face.

I’m puzzled by my mother’s shopping choices. I take it that as we are from Berlin, we must be a cut above the rest, so we should be going to the best shops, not the worst. And why do we go only in the late afternoon? I know that other people like Jägerlein go at any time of the day. My mother doesn’t explain these anomalies, and I sense I’m not supposed to know the real reason, although I’m still convinced it has to do with our being proper Germans, while the villagers are not. Nobody tells me where I’ve gone wrong. Nobody explains that my mother is a vicious and degenerate Jewess, that the best shops won’t serve her, that in any case she’s allowed to shop only between the hours of three and five so that decent Aryans shoppers can arrange to avoid the disgusting sight of her altogether.

My parents have always been bickering and crying (I think that’s normal—what else do I know?), but they never openly mention this source of their troubles. Imagine, I can’t recall ever being called a half-Jew yet, let alone a Yid, and perhaps I never have been. I don’t even know what a Yid or half-Jew is. Sara does, of course; she knows all right. And so do the others. But not me. Why should I? I’m never allowed out to play with the village children, so they aren’t going to tell me. And neither Jägerlein nor my mother is going to either. As for my brother and sisters—they’re certainly not going to tell me what it’s like to be called a half-Jew or a dirty Yid. Like rape victims, they never tell because they feel they’re guilty.

I don’t know it yet, but we are here only because my father’s marriage to his no longer loved or loving Jewish wife cost him his fashionable parish in Germany. No sooner had the Nazis been voted into power there than a trio of brawny Brownshirts turned up on his doorstep and told him to go and find another twig to perch on. He was offered a refuge in England by the Bishop of Chichester, but his patriotism prevented him from going to a country which might one day be at war again with the Fatherland. (Patriotism’s going to be another favorite family topic.) So he found a parish in neighboring pre-Nazi Austria, which he should have known was more or less like jumping out of the fire into the frying pan. It didn’t take long to feel the heat again. I’d only just had my fourth birthday in fact when our German brothers marched into Austria amid general jubilation to unite us with the Fatherland and rid us of the malignant Jew, whatever that was. (I thought it was something like the rats in the coal cellar.)

[Being the patriarch of a half-Jewish/half-Aryan family, the narrator’s father is concerned with procuring . . .]

Those Aryan certificates involve Willibald in a lot of extra work, by the way. Worthy citizens who want to keep their official jobs or join the Party often have to track down their parents’ and grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ baptismal records all over the Reich, and then get the local pastor to authenticate them—all, as Willibald frequently complains, without payment to the pastor. A bitter pill for him to swallow, especially when he thinks of his own children’s unsatisfactory ancestors, but it’s no fun for the aspiring Aryans either. Imagine how much trailing up and down and across the country that entails for those poor people, from city to city, town to town, village to village! And the fear that they might find a Solomon or a David right at the last godforsaken hamlet when all the rest were spotless! Everyone going back to their father’s birthplace and their mother’s birthplace and then all their parents’ birthplaces—it’s like a rerun of the census of the Jews when Christ was born, only this time the Slaughter of the Innocents is going to be a far, far bigger do.

What It’s like to be a half-caste German Jew in Occupied Austria

The Kaminsky Cure