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

Wehrmacht soldiers threw household items into great piles and displayed finer items on tables. My pulse quickened as I approached the heaps, sorted according to use and gender. Shoes and handbags. Crates of costume jewelry. Coats and dresses. Not all the finest styles, but with a little hunting, one could find the best labels for next to nothing. That elevated Mutti’s mood, and she started a pile for us.
    “Look, Chanel,” I said, holding out a red hat.
    “No hats,” Mutti said. “You want lice? And why cover your hair, your best asset?”
    I tossed the hat back on the pile, pleased with the compliment. Though my shoulder-length hair was not white blond, many would have considered it honey gold in the right light, a good thing, since every German girl wanted blond hair, and the use of peroxide was discouraged.
    We passed a mound of canvases and framed pictures. A painting of two men embracing lay on top, the canvas spiked through on a spear from a sculpture below.
    “My God, Jew art,” Mutti said. “Can’t they just hang a calendar on the wall like the rest of us?”
    On his way home from the pharmacy, Father joined us there by the piles. The creases on his face looked deeper that day. A rough night on the sofa.
    I lifted a scrapbook from a table and flipped through the pages, past black-and-white photographs of someone’s beach vacation.
    “This is undignified,” Father said. “You two call yourselves Christians?”
    Of course he disapproved. Why had he even stopped to speak with us? I tossed the scrapbook on our pile.
    “Anton, can you not relax a bit?” Mutti said.
    I pulled a painting, one of two of grazing cows, out from under a crush of framed canvases. It was well done, perhaps even a masterwork. Traditional German art. Just what the Propaganda Ministry found suitable, and something every cultured woman should own.
    “What do you think, Mutti?”
    Mutti pointed at the cows and laughed. “Oh, it’s you,
Kleine Kuh.
”
    Kleine Kuh
was Mutti’s nickname for me. Little heifer. As a child she’d had a brown cow that I reminded her of. I had long ago dealt with not being as dainty and blond as my mother, but the name still rankled.
    “Don’t call Herta that,” Father said. “No girl should be called a cow.”
    It was good to have Father’s support, even if he was a lawbreaker who listened to foreign broadcasts and read every foreign newspaper he could lay hands on. I took the two paintings and set them in our pile.
    “Where have the owners of all this gone?” I asked, though I had a general idea.
    “To the KZ, I suppose,” Mutti said. “It’s their own fault. They could have stepped aside. Gone to England. They don’t work; that is the problem.”
    “Jews have jobs,” Father said.
    “
Ja,
of
course,
but what jobs? Lawyers? That is not really work. They own the factories, but do they
do
the work? No. I’d rather do ten jobs than work for them.”
    Mutti pulled a dressing gown from the pile and held it up. “Would this fit you, Anton?” Father and I didn’t have to see the silver
K
on the sleeve to know who the former owner was.
    “No, thank you,” he said, and Mutti walked off, scouting the piles.
    “Are you sure, Father?” I took the dressing gown and held it out to him. “It’s a nice one.”
    He took a step back. “What has happened to you, Herta? Where is my girl with the tender heart, always first to take up the collection can for the neediest? Katz was a man you could have learned from.”
    “I haven’t changed.” It was obvious he didn’t support or even like me much, but did he have to broadcast this?
    “Katz was compassionate. A doctor without love is like a mechanic.”
    “Of course I’m compassionate. Do you know what it’s like to be able to change a person’s life just with these hands?”
    “You’ll never be a surgeon with Hitler around. Can’t you see that? Your generation is so pigheaded.”
    Much as I hated to admit it, he was right about the surgeon