Crossing the Borders of Time by Leslie Maitland Read Free Book Online

handwriting in flowery letters that they placed like offerings on their parents’ pillows, they annually extended their thanks and pledged to mend their performance at home and in school. The tone of their letters hardly varied at all:

    Hanna’s 1934 New Year’s letter to her parents, written in the hard-to-decipher script called Sütterlin, taught in German schools from 1915 to 1941
    “ I promise to work harder to please you in the New Year ,” Hanna wrote, for example, at age eleven in 1934. “ I won’t give any fresh answers. I will try hard to excel in school .” And at Rosh Hashanah when she was twelve: “ In the last year, I was sometimes bad. For that I ask you from the bottom of my heart to forgive me. May God make me do only good things and give you all the love and good luck you deserve. So wishes your faithful daughter .”
    In an effort to gain her father’s respect, Hanna worked to find biblical questions she might raise with him during the family’s outings each Sunday, when Buhler, the chauffeur, often drove them to the so-called Alter Friedhof or seventeenth-century Old Cemetery, where the ancestors of the town’s Catholic elite lay buried. There—his preferred weekend pastime—Sigmar led them on tours through the elaborate graves, expounding upon the generational histories of the entrenched Freiburg families whose mossy tombstones he found so intriguing.
    But whenever Hanna asked him about God or death or the reason for evil, Sigmar’s answer was curt and unyielding. “We don’t question these things,” he sternly rebuked her. Ever after, she cringed to recall how shocked he had been when she tried to show off her biblical insight by sharing the news she had heard from a friend—that Adam and Eve were really chased out of Eden not for chastely eating a forbidden apple, but for angering God by engaging in sex with each other. “Who told you such a thing?” Sigmar demanded, and he directed her never to speak with her theological expert again.
    Ever aiming to please, in school Hanna was a hardworking and excellent student. Her prize-winning entry in a penmanship contest requiring the use of a highly formal, complicated Germanic script called Sütterlin was hung on display in a local museum, and she set her sights on winning the top academic prize in her class, for which Sigmar had held out the reward of a new bicycle. When her marks won top ranking, however, school officials refused to grant her the prize because she was Jewish, and Sigmar made no allowance for that injustice.
    As a result, she never got the new bike she craved until she bought me a shiny white Schwinn when I was eleven, outfitting it with near-giddy delight with baskets and bell and red handlebar streamers. Then thirty-six, she occasionally rode it around town while I was in school. Yet those solitary excursions up and down the empty hills of suburban New Jersey could not have brought the same joy she had tasted in daydreams, pedaling in all gleaming splendor through the bustling streets of the center of Freiburg, until she arrived at her school, greeted by the admiring glances of all her classmates.
    With new laws on education in 1933, the Reich decreed that the proportion of non-Aryan students in German schools should be reduced to a maximum of 5 percent, ousting thousands of Jewish children from their classrooms and forcing them into ad hoc Jewish schools. The Central Committee of German Jews set rules for these schools that called for teaching the children about both sides of their lives, the Jewish and German, about the contributions each had made to the other, and about the tensions dividing them now. Under grave existing circumstances, “the entire education must be directed toward the creation of determined and secure Jewish personalities,” the committee said, because “the Jewish child must be enabled to take up and master the exceptionally difficult struggle for survival which awaits him.” In light of her