I look away from the pictures. But Mrs. M. is speaking without her hesitation, now — volubly, clearly, her smooth forehead lined by two deep lines of anger and decision.
“No,” she disagrees, “he wouldn’t have an easy time at all — he would be miserable. Reason! I’ve had four years of that, and I’m through with that kind of reason. I can’t even get chicken soup for the child, or stewed fruit, or a good broth. There’s no chance of buying reasonable food in those war-camps of cities. Not even hominy!” she cries, “nor rice!” accusingly. “There’s a shortage of eggs today, and tomorrow it will be butter. And it’s so much worse all the time — everything’s grown worse in four-and-a-half years — food, clothing, laws and spies. No one lives in safety in our country.” She shakes her head indignantly. “Not even the most harmless people know what it’s like not to be in constant danger — of arrest at any moment, denounced by anyone who finds it worth his while, for some unfortunate remark he may or may not have made. If my husband has to press a Nazi patient for his bill, we live in fear of his saying we’ve made fun of the Führer, or joked about the Minister of Propaganda. And if that happens, we’ll both be arrested with no one to ask why — and our son would have to manage for himself.”
I like her, standing beautiful and defiant, looking down at the pictures of her son who will have to manage, and who cannot have his hominy, and will not have his rice tomorrow. I pretend to know less than I do, and seem more ignorant to find out what this woman really thinks and feels. I need to discover the reason driving her out of her country after four-and-a-half years of “reason.” So I tell her that I know she is unhappy and worried by material lacks. But it isn’t so different from wartime. “I was a child during the War,” I argue, “we really had hardly a thing to eat, but we were gay, alert children.”
Mrs. M. interrupts me here. Her voice trembles with impatience. “What are you talking about? As if you didn’t know the difference! As if you didn’t know how sensible things were, comparatively, during the War! Germany was really threatened then, from the outside, and we did without things then for a good and sufficient reason. But now, in peacetime, so that we may threaten and bluster and our fine Herr Führer may rattle his saber and act like a madman until the world is in panic? Really, it isn’t the lack of butter that makes me decide — it’s all the other things. I want the child to become a human being, a good and decent man who knows the difference between lies and truth, aware of liberty and dignity and true reason, not the opportunistic reason ‘dictated by policy’ which turns black white if it’s useful at the moment. I want the boy to become a decent human being — a man and not a Nazi!”
Our drinks arrive: gentian brandy, from the big healthful mountain gentians — tasting like the meadows and pastures of the mountain country that is our home country, this woman’s and mine.
“To the young gentleman,” I drink the toast, “to Junker Franz — may he become a human being!”
We will have to go, soon; she, so simply, back to Munich (I feel it in the pit of my stomach and in my knees), and I “home” to Zurich, where my parents are now living. But I want to hear more from her, and the afternoon is advancing. I pretend ignorance, a little ashamed to be asking her questions that are not entirely frank, ashamed to subject her to these questions, now that her angry determined look has passed, in this late light, to helplessness and tenderness and perplexity before the meanness and injustice she is remembering. I ask her how much she can expect to influence Franz when he is a little older. She has admitted that she is afraid of the schools’ influence — the new schools, which teach that the German people are 100,000,000 strong (generously including all the German-speaking population, Dutch, Austrian, Polish, or even American), and that one is German by the grace of God and the State, and in God’s name by the grace of the Führer of the Third Reich and his Archangels, the Leaders of the Third Reich.
She expects nothing.
“There’s no influence possible,” she tells me. “It isn’t only school, it’s the Hitler Youth Group, enforced camp life, Wehrsport — sport whose purpose is to teach defense from martial attack — and by then Franz will come home, saluting with his hand up. Then, if I suggest that he go and do his lessons, he’ll say, ‘But I’m going to target-practice!’ And if I tell him he’ll never learn anything that way, with those bad manners, he can denounce me. And, at first, I shall only be warned.”
“And what about religion?” I ask, knowing the answer as I speak, “Won’t his religious teachers affect him?”
The answer is that the best of them will be in concentration camps, under the pretexts of rape, robbery, or having sold their stamp collections into foreign countries (which is punishable by death). But she tells me a story instead:
“A friend of mine, a girl from school, married very young, right after graduation. She married a Jew. And her son, Wolfgang, who is seven now, is a half-Jew. I asked her how he was the other day; and she said, ‘He’s fine — a little better today, really; at least the sun’s not out.’ I didn’t understand at all. She had to explain: ‘On fine days, all the other boys play in the yard — and then he cries because he can’t play with them—of course he can’t, he’s half-Jewish.’ The mother was quite calm as she said that,” Mrs. M. finishes, “but I won’t forget her face as she said ‘… at least the sun’s not out.’” She looks away. “And Franz, growing up, will be among the boys, true Christians, in brown shirts, playing in the yard, while little Wolfgang cries and cries.”
Mrs. M. is drawn up tall again, defiant and hard. “I’d rather have the right to comfort that boy when he cries, than not to have the right to slap my own son for that kind of revolting cruelty!” That is the alternative, the one choice of rights that is left.
She adds: “Have you any idea what a great man Wolfgang’s father was, before the government changed? He was a physician and surgeon — my husband’s superior at the hospital. Just after Hitler came in, they had an emergency operation, a little ‘Aryan’ boy with appendicitis. Peritonitis had begun; it was a matter of life and death, you see, and the Professor, who still held his post, was performing the operation himself. And in the silence of the operating room, deep under the anaesthetic, the child began to scream, suddenly, shouting phrases cut so deep into his soul that they remained even during the death under ether. ‘Down with the Jews!’ he cried out, ‘Kill the Jews, we have to get rid of them!’ My husband tells me that moment gripped him — the calm Jewish Professor, going steadily on with the operation, the knife not trembling, everything going ahead to save that screaming child. And, really, on the other side, a thing like that is far worse than any humiliation for a child, far uglier, more hopeless. It drives me mad to think that my son might ever be able to turn to death and murder in his sleep, because he had been taught to do so, and because I had no right to stop that teaching. I don’t think that could happen to me — it’s unreal, a nightmare; but it has the power of a nightmare, weighing on my chest, sitting at my head night and day; it tortures me until I weep; and when I sleep it cuts off my breath. But, profoundly in me, I know — as we know in dreams — it isn’t true, I shall never let it go that far, I shall see that my son is brought up differently. He must never pass, on the way to school, those newspaper stands, where the Stürmer is up with all its obscenities; he must never define Rassenschande (the intermarriage or mingling of Jews and Aryans), nor the best ways of doing away with the French, the Jews and the students of the Bible. Let him learn what is right, not what is expedient; let him learn something of use in his life, and not spend all his time at target-practice. Then he won’t denounce me, he will be quite fond of me and listen to what I tell him, when we speak. And he will love and serve the country we live in then; but he will know, too, that the love of freedom and justice comes before everything.”