Heart pounding, Sara squeezed her brother’s arm. “Pay no attention to him.”
Miraculously, Natan obeyed. The angry man said nothing more to them for the rest of the journey, but Sara was conscious of his malevolence, and of the sidelong suspicious glances from other passengers. In the seat in front of them, two young women about Sara’s age murmured to each other and inched as far away from her and Natan as they could. From time to time they glanced over their shoulders, their mouths pursed and noses wrinkled as if they smelled something foul. Cheeks burning, Sara fixed her attention on the scenes passing outside her window, the early autumn hues coloring the countryside, the disheartening sight of picturesque villages draped in swastika flags and banners.
When they reached Nuremberg, Sara and Natan quickly retrieved their luggage and disembarked before anyone else could confront them. First they went to the home of a friend of Natan’s, a fellow journalist who had offered them a place to stay since rally attendees had booked every hotel room and boardinghouse in the city. Over supper, their host and his wife repeatedly emphasized that they should avoid drawing attention to themselves and must deny that they were Jews if challenged. As they walked to the site of the rally, six square miles of stadiums, buildings, and parade grounds, Natan handed Sara a stiff paper card. “Keep this in a safe place,” he said. “It’s your press credential.”
“So official,” she joked to hide her rising trepidation, but after a closer look, she gasped. “TheLos Angeles Times?”
“That’s right. I’m covering the rally for them as well as theJudische Nachrichtenblatt. Under a nom de plume.”
“What if the Gestapo finds out?”
“Writing for a non-Jewish newspaper is theleastoffensive crime I plan to commit against the Nazis.” His brow furrowed. “You don’t expect to bring them down without breaking their rules, do you?”
“No—no, of course not.”
She steeled herself as they approached the massive parade grounds. They had missed the arrival of Hitler’s motorcade, but throngs of Nazi faithful still milled about excitedly, swastika flags clenched in fists, pins like Dieter’s glinting on lapels, arms snapping out the Hitler salute when acquaintances met, impromptu chorales breaking into the “Horst Wessel Lied.”
As the crowd pressed upon them, Natan seized Sara’s hand and led her through the crush of people into the stadium, where they joined the press corps, a pocket of watchful stoicism amid the frenzy. As Natan conferred with colleagues, Sara took in the scene. The air was electric with expectation and euphoria, the seats filled with men and women in various Nazi regalia from simple armbands to full uniforms, their rapt gazes fixed upon the parade grounds, where more than 150,000 marchers paraded in precise geometric formations. Boys clad in the uniforms of the Hitler Youth performed on drums and trumpets; girls in the middy blouses and full, dark blue skirts of the Bund Deutscher Mädel sang anthems to the Führer and the Fatherland. Transfixed with foreboding, Sara felt herself shrinking inwardly the more the audience roared approval. She knew the spectacle was designed to inspire Hitler’s worshippers and intimidate everyone else, and she hated to feel its power working upon herself.
Day by day, the pageant at the parade grounds varied little—marchers, songs, speeches by party dignitaries, displays of reinvigorated military might—but on the evening of September 15, the rally would culminate in the much-anticipated announcement of new party policies.
Natan managed to claim two places for them in the press box at Congress Hall, modeled after the Colosseum in Rome, with seating for more than fifty thousand. As they awaited the first speaker, Sara quietly debated the possibilities with a few members of the foreign press she had befriended. As their predictions grew more and more dire, they concluded that whatever Hitler and his inner circle had devised would inevitably be worse than anything they had yet imagined.
Before long, Göring took the stage. After a brief preface, he began to praise the Weimar flag, calling it “the symbol of national glory in the days before the war,” which even afterward had remained “encased in glory.” In the future the Nazis expected the old Imperial flag to be treated with respect, but, he noted, tapping the podium with a forefinger for emphasis, “in the struggles for the regeneration of Germany the swastika has become for us a holy symbol.” For that reason, the current German flag would be retired, superseded by the swastika banner of the National Socialists.
“Well, why not?” said Natan ironically. “The Nazi Party has become the state and the state is the party.”
“It’s wrong,” said Sara, indignant. “Germany and the Nazi Party are not one and the same.”
But even as she spoke, she wondered if that were true anymore.
Then Göring announced two additional laws, cruel and chilling, his words so unbelievable and wrong that they pinned her in place, trembling, unable to cover her ears or look away.
The first was the Reich Citizenship Law, which redefined citizenship based upon parentage rather than birthplace. Jews were identified as “not of German blood” and were thereby stripped of their citizenship and all associated civil rights, including the right to vote. Even Jews who had converted to Christianity were bound by the decree.
Then Göring announced the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor.
“In bygone years, the German people have suffered much from the unpardonable sin of racial impurity,” he shouted, to a thunderous roar of accord from the audience. “German women must be protected against racial contamination.”
To that end, marriages between Germans and Jews were henceforth forbidden. Marriages made in violation of the law were declared void, and extramarital relations between Germans and “non-Aryans” were prohibited. Marriages conducted abroad with the intention of circumventing the decree would not be recognized in Germany. In order to prevent the defilement of German domestic servants by Jewish employers, Jews could no longer hire German women under the age of forty-five years. Violators were subject to punishments including fines, imprisonment, or, in the most egregious circumstances, hard labor at a concentration camp.
Sickened, Sara forgot to take notes, her hands clenched around her pad and pencil until her knuckles turned white and her fingers ached. It did not matter. Every provision of the abhorrent new laws was seared into her memory.
Eventually the rally ended. Sara and Natan collected their luggage from his friend’s home and traveled back to Berlin. Unnerved and shaken, Sara felt as if she had aged a year since she had last sat aboard a train. Only a few days before, she was German, a citizen of the country of her birth. Now, following a rubber-stamp vote in the Reichstag and the stroke of a pen, she was stateless, a woman without a homeland. Or so the law decreed, although she felt no less German than before.
Reports of the new laws had already been widely published by the time Sara and Natan arrived home, and yet their parents hastened to meet them in the foyer, ashen-faced, seeking verification, hoping in vain that the press had misrepresented the new decrees. Natan confirmed their worst fears and divulged something they had not yet read in the papers: The new laws revoked all exemptions for Jewish veterans of the Great War. The modest protection their father’s past honorable service had provided the Weitz family was no more.
“I fought for this country,” Sara’s father said, pained and bewildered, sinking heavily into a chair. “I bled for this country. I was willing to give my life for it. How can anyone deny that I am a citizen?”
As his breathing became labored, Sara and her mother flew to his side, loosened his necktie, and offered soothing reassurances they did not themselves believe. When calm was restored, Sara’s mother ventured that perhaps it would be prudent for them to stay with Amalie in Switzerland until the implications of the new laws became clear.
One implication was perfectly clear to Sara: She could not marry Dieter now, even if she wanted to with all her heart.
The next day when Sara returned to school, the atmosphere on campus was tense and expectant, with undercurrents of malevolence and apprehension sweeping through the quadrangles and corridors. Some of her professors excised politics from their lectures so completely that one could almost believe they were unaware of what had taken place. Others wove the rally and the Nuremberg Laws into their lectures, some in outrage, others in jubilation. After one lecture in which a venerable professor praised the Führer and waxed rhapsodic about cleansing the university of the poison of Jewish influence, Sara and several Jewish classmates instinctively drew together as the students streamed from the hall.
They gathered outside a discreet distance away to share information, ponder rumors, worry aloud about their Jewish friends who had stopped attending classes—“We thought we had lost you too,” one classmate told Sara—and speculate about what their loss of citizenship would mean for their status at the university. Would they be expelled? Would Jews be forbidden to practice the few occupations remaining open to them? Would intermarried couples be required to live apart? Would Jews be forced to emigrate from the country of their birth, the only homeland they knew?
German Jews no longer had any voice in the political process. Would those who had not been silenced speak for them, or would they look the other way and count their blessings that it was the Jews who suffered and not themselves?
