Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly Read Free Book Online Page A

It was a small shop, but Heinz filled every inch with meat. He hung hams and long ribs of pork outside along the front of the store like socks on a clothesline and displayed whole hogs spread-eagled, bellies slit wide, glistening entrails scooped and saved.
    At first I blanched at the sight, but as a medical student interested in surgery, I gradually grew to see beauty in the most unlikely places. The startling ivory of a splayed rib cage. A calf’s severed head, peaceful as if asleep, a fringe of lashes black against the damp fur.
    “I make good use of every part of an animal,” Heinz often said. “Everything but the squeal.” He boiled pig parts on the stove all day until the windows fogged and the shop somehow smelled both putrid and sweet as only a butcher shop can.
    As greater numbers of Jews left the city, we became one of the few quality meat shops left, and business improved daily. One afternoon Heinz passed along news benefiting the customers lined up two deep at the front counter.
    “You have to get over there to the
platz,
ladies. They are selling everything from the warehouses. I heard Frau Brandt found a sable coat there with a silk lining. Hurry, now.”
    No one said they were selling items taken from the Jews, but we all knew.
    “How awful they took people’s things away like that,” said
Tante
Ilsa, Heinz’s wife, who avoided the shop as much as she could. When she did come, she brought me a jar of her strawberry marmalade, which I’d once complimented. Ilsa kept her coat wrapped tight around her even though it was summer and stayed only two minutes. “It’s a sin to pick through someone’s things as if they’re dead.”
    Tante
Ilsa paid for most of my medical school costs. A kind praying mantis of a woman, tall and gentle with a head too small for her body, she’d been left a great deal of money by her mother and used it sparingly, no matter how
Onkel
Heinz brayed.
    Heinz smiled, causing his piggy eyes to disappear into the folds of his fat face. “Oh, don’t worry, Ilsa. They probably
are
dead by now,” he said.
    The patrons turned away, but I knew he was right. If Ilsa was not careful, her own considerable belongings would end up there alongside the Jews’. The gold cross around her neck was no protection. Did Ilsa know what Heinz did in the refrigerated room? Perhaps on an instinctual level, the way a calf knows to become restless on slaughter day.
    “You shed a tear when the Jew Krystel’s shop closed, Ilsa. My own wife a Jew friend, shopping at the competition. That is loyalty,
nicht
?”
    “He has those baby hens I like.”
    “
Had,
Ilsa. It doesn’t help my business when this gets around. Soon you’ll be on the
Pranger-Liste.
”
    I held my tongue, but I’d already seen
Tante
Ilsa’s name on the
Pranger-Liste,
the public list of German women who shopped at Jewish stores, posted about the town, a black stripe running diagonally across it.
    “You don’t see Krystel’s wife in
here,
” Heinz said. “Thank God. And no more Frau Zates, either
.
Wants a cabbage but will only pay for a half. Who buys half a cabbage? I cut it, and who buys the other half? No one, that’s who.”
    “Why should she buy whole when she needs only half?” Ilsa asked.
    “
Mein Gott,
she does it on purpose. Can’t you see?”
    “Keep your thumb off the scale, or you’ll have
no
customers, Heinz.”
    Mutti and I left Heinz and Ilsa to bicker and walked along to the sale at the
platz.
It was rare Mutti had any time to shop, since she was up at five-thirty each day to do mending before she cleaned houses or worked in the shop. Thanks to the Führer’s economic miracle, she was working fewer afternoon hours but still seemed just as tired at day’s end. She took my hand as we crossed the street, and I felt her rough skin. I could barely look at her dishpan hands, red and peeling from cleaning toilets and dishes. No amount of lanolin cream could heal them.
    People gathered in the square to watch as