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

top academic performance, Hanna was allowed to remain, a token Jew, in the German Höhere Mädchenschule (the Higher Girls’ School).
    “Now here is the perfect example of a young lady with distinctively Aryan features,” a Nazi Party official observed to her class, his hand on Hanna’s shoulder, during a visit to lecture the students on how to recognize non-Aryan facial characteristics. No one dared contradict him, but the incident inspired Hanna’s teacher to get even with her for “passing” as German. When Christmastime came and the class was preparing its annual play, he assigned her the role of the Christkind , the Christ child, whose part called for bearing a sack with a gift for the class. Hanna entered the room with the bag slung over her shoulder, and her classmates rushed from their seats to circle around her, eager to see what Baby Jesus had brought them. But when they tore open the wrapping, she was ashamed to discover the present the teacher selected was a large framed picture of Adolf Hitler. The only Jew in the class, Hanna flushed in humiliation to have been forced to deliver, as if a sacred gift, the Führer’s picture to hang in the schoolroom, and she wept as her classmates hooted with laughter.
    Generally speaking, her fellow students nevertheless treated her kindly, even as fear of Nazi reprisals against their parents compelled some of them to ask her to sneak around to their back doors whenever she came to play at their homes. In school, each time a teacher entered a classroom, Hanna had no choice but to join with her classmates, jumping to their feet and shouting “ Heil Hitler! ” with a Nazi salute, until it became such a habit for her that she accidentally greeted the rabbi that way when she encountered him walking alone on the street.
    At Monday morning flag-raising ceremonies in front of her school, Hanna’s classmates all wore the Bund Deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls) uniforms that Hitler Youth leaders prescribed for girls: navy skirts with white blouses, white kneesocks with tassels, and wide leather belts and bandoliers. In an effort to blend in, Hanna persuaded Alice to buy a white blouse and socks for her and to have the dressmaker produce a similar kick-pleated skirt. The bandolier, the most desirable part of the outfit, was, of course, not accessible to her. But walking home to the Poststrasse one day after school, she was drawn to a crowd of cheering young people who stood gathered near the train station in front of the Zähringer Hof, one of the city’s finest hotels. Garlands of flowers draped the doorway, and bloodred Nazi banners flew from the windows. The children were shouting and waving to a room several floors high above, calling for “dear Göring,” Hitler’s chief aide, “to be so kind as to come to the window.”

    Freiburg’s Adolf-Hitler-Strasse, lined with Nazi banners and flags, between 1935 and 1940. To create a street grand enough to honor the Führer, the city’s main thoroughfare, the Kaiserstrasse, was linked to other streets to the north and south . (photo credit 3.4)
Lieber Göring, sei so nett ,
Komm doch mal ans Fensterbrett!
     
    Over and over they chanted their couplet, their clear children’s voices insistent and charged with excitement, until the uniformed figure of Hermann Göring appeared at the window and acknowledged their adulation with an exemplary Nazi salute. Below him stood a generation determined to rise, phoenixlike, from the devastating defeats their parents had suffered in war and under its onerous treaty. But in the cheering crowd on the street, there was at least one young Jewish girl, confused and uncertain, whose voice mingled with those of her German peers.
    Many years later, when I was a teenager, my father would bring my mother to tears of frustration and anger at the dinner table when he rebuked her for the passive compliance of Jews who had, out of fear, complied with Fascist commands instead of