May 10th 1933 — Berlin
The ceremonial pyre raged on the Opernplatz, sending sparks and ashes into the cooling twilight, captured on film by the Ministry or Propaganda. Encircling it, a cordon of Ernst Rohm's SA stood holding flambeaus in rigid attention. Curious onlookers watched as the books were hurled into the flames, fluttering upwards like broken doves before falling into the inferno. Nationalistic songs were shouted with gusto by the SA and Hitler Youth, followed by fire-oath chants with straight-arm salutes as the fire was fed.
Across Weimar Germany this scene was repeating itself, the nation’s intelligentsia being singled out for ‘enlightenment’ in National Socialism by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels. Manuscripts, paintings and etchings marked as ‘un-German’ were being incinerated in an orgy of destruction. Student leaders wearing swastika armbands directed more groups of SA to rooms and lecture halls that had been under surveillance for months. The libraries were stripped of their contents and precious tomes were earmarked for destruction in a clinical manner, impelled by the day long radio broadcasts and posters plastered up all over the city.
Across from the platz where the inferno raged, in the basement theatre space of Humboldt University, Eva Molenaar put her dog-eared script down. She could hear the roar of the crowd drifting into the room. In the small rehearsal space she stood with her fiance and fellow actor, Jonas Zamoyski, and the director, Herr Gruber.
‘I hear they’re burning books by Jack London and H.G. Wells,’ she said uneasily.
‘And Thomas Mann,’ added Jonas, glancing toward the door. Another roar from the platz drifted in and the chants seemed to come in waves.
Instinctively she moved closer to Jonas. Gruber leaned toward them. 'It seems wolves and Martians have unsettled Doctor Goebbels. Now pay attention you two. Ignore those pyromaniacs and their goons over at the platz.'
Eva noted the script was shaking slightly in the director’s hands. The noise outside swelled momentarily. Gruber glanced up toward the door, then turned to the couple, clearing his throat quietly. 'They are in love, yes, your characters?'
Eva and Jonas exchanged a glance. Jonas' eyes twinkled and Eva dimpled back. They nodded. With a gesture, Gruber had Eva sitting on the edge of the bed and moved Jonas upstage, then stepped back. Satisfied with their positioning, he continued, 'Now think, what would they be doing? It's the morning. This scene, Jonas, is like Romeo and Juliet, Act 3, Scene 3. The lovers are about to part after their first night together; the sowing of the first doubts, of love and loss. He's leaving her chamber as they talk. What action could he be doing?' Gruber was inspired, moving around in his out-sized suit. He looks wonderfully crumpled, thought Eva.
'Getting dressed,' grinned Jonas, tipping a wink to her.
'Excellent. Yes! Getting dressed.'
Eva blushed deeply. Gruber noted it swept down to her collar bone. Gruber clapped his hands. 'Now again!'
They were preparing a short two-hander that Jonas had written and performed with Eva at Warsaw’s summer theatre. As a result they both had been invited to Berlin to perform for the student body studying Polish drama, notably the works of Leon Schiller. Herr Gruber, a disciple of Brecht, wanted to add a more nihilistic slant to the work. They were discussing the piece further when the door to the rehearsal room was kicked in.
Two SA troopers in their late-teens stood red-faced, sweating drunk, with batons in their hands.
Gruber strode forward, demanding the reason for the intrusion. He was beaten repeatedly then stamped on. He fell to the ground. Eva screamed. Jonas placed himself in front of her as the two SA troopers strutted in. They ignored Jonas’ shouts of protest as they were drawn to the beautiful young girl. No more than seventeen, her auburn hair sat shoulder-length, framing a heart-shaped face and grey Nordic eyes.
‘Well, well, well what do we have here?’ the taller of the two troopers said, ogling Eva. The smaller one with porcine eyes snatched away her script.
‘A play is it?’ he slurred, looking back at Gruber’s body. Gruber lay still with blood now pooling around him. The trooper tried to read the print. When he couldn’t, he proceeded to tear the script slowly and deliberately.
‘Looks like degenerate Jewish literature,’ he sneered.
‘Wir sind nicht judisch,’ countered Jonas slowly.
‘Any nudity?’ rasped the other one, his eyes never leaving Eva.
Eva drew closer to Jonas. Her mind was frozen in terror. The two Brownshirts moved in and out of the minimal overhead lighting. The smell of smoke, sweat and Scotch whisky assailed her. One of them unsheathed a knife from his jack boot and sidled toward her, grinning.
‘Yep, nudity alright.’
Jonas lunged at him. ‘Run!’ he shouted at Eva.
She bolted for the door as the three men struggled. The smaller one grabbed her by her hair, pulling a clump of it out. Leaping over Gruber's prone body, her forward momentum drove her into the corridor. Her neck was wet and she was bleeding. Pressing the palm of her hand against the wound, she sprinted for the courtyard.
Jonas floored the first attacker with a punch to the jaw. The smaller one ducked under the follow through and slashed him across the arm with his knife. The blade cut deep into the muscles of Jonas’ forearm. With his free hand he smacked the man down onto the floor, the knife clattering away from them. Bleeding heavily, Jonas bolted for the door.
He paused deliberately to lure the men away from Eva, hoping their bloodlust was sated and they would ignore her. Their stumbling footfalls and whooping cat-calls told him they were behind him. Pausing for another beat, he watched Eva running for the courtyard. He spied a stairwell to the upper corridors and bounded up the steps two at a time, his wound leaving a spotted trail.
Eva sprinted toward the university’s square. In it stood two furniture removal vans with their engines idling, the back doors open. A line of SA and Nazi sympathisers were loading hundreds of books onto them. They were surrounded by angry students and lecturers pushing, shoving and throwing punches. The SA in turn retaliated with batons and kicks. More SA arrived in trucks. The campus was fast becoming a battlefield.
A disturbance overhead made Eva look up. She screamed.
Jonas was pitched over the third floor balcony onto the cobbles below by the two troopers, where he was set upon by more SA, throwing books aside and sprinting over to him. They started stamping, kicking and swinging their batons onto his unprotected head.
Eva tried to run to him. Ellen Eidelstein, a girl Eva and Jonas had been rooming with, ran toward her from the student protest around the van.
Eva was shrieking and struggling to get to Jonas. Ellen pulled her away, removing her scarf and putting it over Eva’s head in case her attackers could see her below. The two men on the balcony were scanning the square, their faces contorted in a drunken rage. Ellen dragged Eva into the mass of protesting students who started running after the vans toward the inferno. The two women ran past it into the unforgiving night filled with the songs of German might and the fluttering ashes of literature.
After an hour of skirting side streets and avoiding crowds, they made it back to Ellen's modest student digs under the cover of night. Sleep wouldn’t come. Eva rocked in the bed as Ellen hugged her and tried to soothe her. Eva sat up rigid and stared, the light through the window framing her in stark light; her eye sockets pitch black like a skull.
Next morning, after the mob had dispersed, Ellen went back to the university to try to collect Eva’s belongings. Mindful of her own striking Semitic looks, she bundled herself into bulky clothes and covered her lush black hair with a plain brown scarf.
In the dressing room behind the rehearsal space, Ellen found only detritus. The stage’s scenery was smashed to matchwood and strewn across the room as if struck by a hurricane.
Gruber’s body was missing, but a thick trail of blood disappeared into the corridor. She found Eva’s suitcase. It smelled of urine. Her underclothes were scattered and her make-up bag had been emptied. Ellen picked around and uncovered in a corner Eva’s passport and identity papers, miraculously preserved amid the ashes of a fire. The faint whiff of Scotch came off the remains. Whoever had lit it had left in a hurry, perhaps disturbed.
Ellen started to weep silently. The once beautiful city of Berlin was now at the mercy of the mob. Pulling herself together, she made her way through the corridors, out into the shadows of the cloisters and slipped out onto the main street.
‘We have to find Jonas, Eva. We have to try to find out if he's alive or dead,’ she had whispered over and over, trying to drown out the whispered cries from Eva’s lips that evening.
After an immense effort, Ellen and Eva, swaddled and holding each other like two old ladies, began the painful search for Jonas. For Eva the journey was a series of indelible images — trams, hospital walls, morgues, unsympathetic staff and hostile police. Her beauty, even in grief, received unwelcome attention from the police and SA patrols that were gathering in strength nearly every day on the street. Every morgue they visited smelled like a butcher’s shop.
She remembered Ellen shouting at a nurse who told her to her face she wouldn’t talk to a Jew.
Eventually they found Jonas in the morgue of the Charite Horsaal. They walked with an attendant amid gurneys with sheets draped over them. Spotting them, the attendant had put down his mop and offered to help. Eva watched him, hunched and old. He was sympathetic and listened to their enquiry with deep-brown concerned eyes. She described Jonas. When the attendant asked for some identifying feature, her mind froze momentarily. Then she spotted a hand sticking out from under a sheet with a ring she recognised. The ring, with an agate stone fashioned to an oval, was a gift for his twentieth birthday from her. She had bought it for him in the market square in the shadow of St Mary’s Basilica in Krakow. A bloodied stump at the middle phalanx of his middle finger indicated his finger had been cut in an attempt to remove it. The morgue attendant pulled the sheet back. The face and body of her dead lover brought a hideous scream from Eva as she tried with her hands to block the bloodied, crushed visage. None of his features remained intact. The face was swollen, flattened and purple. The once-lush flaxen hair was matted brown with blood. The beautiful mouth that she had kissed a thousand times was torn, split and discoloured. Ellen held her close as Eva’s body, racked with spasms, screamed out his name, her voice echoing out into the corridor.
Ellen left, telling Eva to remain there as she went to find a local undertaker.
Eva took the mutilated hand with the agate ring and held it. She summoned every prayer she knew, believing somehow that he was still alive. Despite her beseeching to Almighty God, Jonas' chest wouldn’t rise. She hunted in her pockets and found a used handkerchief. She gently wiped the congealed blood from his shattered visage, her tears falling onto his face. They mixed with the blood and dirt, and clean smears of grey coloured skin appeared as she wiped him tenderly.
By chance Ellen had found an undertaker in the hospital foyer, a kindly man named Bergen. Rohm’s thugs had had a busy night; Bergen was collecting the remains of two men beaten to death on the street by the SA. Bergen and Ellen returned to the morgue to find Eva keening gently into Jonas' ear as she cleaned him tenderly.
Eva accompanied Jonas' remains back to Krakow to his family after telegraphing them the dreadful news. She pawned her diamond engagement ring as a down-payment for the coffin, storage and transport of Jonas' body. She met his parents at the border station with Bergen. The coffin was removed from the hearse and placed on board. The family greeted her coldly, believing that Eva was somehow responsible for Jonas' fate.
'This pretty and flirty girl took my son to Berlin and brought this horror upon us,’ cried his mother, Zoya, at the sight of the coffin.
Eva bade farewell to Ellen at the station, promising to stay in touch, neither one really believing it through their tears.
The journey by train was fraught. Eva tried to comfort Zoya who scowled at her beneath the black shawl. The family whispered among themselves, throwing glances in her direction, offering no comfort. Jonas’ father, Christian Zamoyski, who had connections in the government, had contacted the German embassy to lodge an official protest. His enquiries, along with the Polish Embassy’s demand for an explanation, were ignored.
Two days later, Jonas was buried in the family plot, his parents, four brothers and three sisters weeping under the gently falling rain. Eva’s parents were buried here in this cemetery too, killed in a car crash a year earlier. She was once told that no two Polish gravestones are ever alike and, looking across the graveyard, Eva couldn't see a single matching silhouette. She stood by their graveside amid six uneven lines of private proud headstones, back from Jonas’ grave. Her Grandmother Agnieszka stood with her, weeping silently. Her Grandfather Henk stood with the grieving family.
The next day, Eva was summoned to Jonas’ family home, a comfortable middle-class dwelling that to Eva had been always filled with laughter. As she stepped over the threshold she felt the pall that had descended throughout the house.
Christian Zamoyski seemed to almost look through her as he held his arm out before her. ‘Good afternoon, Eva. Please step into my study,’
The room was dimly lit. Somewhere in a room above a woman was keening. Occasional sounds rang out, followed by cries. Christian had somehow shrunk in stature. An ill-fitting jacket seemed to flap about him on a hidden breeze. With a sigh he slumped into the chair behind a large desk and from a drawer he produced a cheque book. He scratched across it with a pen to the slow tick of the grandfather clock in the gloom. ‘Thank you for bringing him safely to the border, Eva.’ He handed her the cheque. It was twice the value of her engagement ring.
‘Thank you, Mr. Zamoyski,’ she stammered with tears pinching the corners of her eyelids, ‘this is too much.’
‘The family are waiting for you in the kitchen,’ Christian whispered as he rose unsteadily. Sighing deeply, he seemed to lose some more of his body mass as he walked toward the door. He guided her through the hall, past the staircase where she and Jonas had chased each other as children, past the cellar door where they had enjoyed their first kiss, and into the kitchen.
Zoya sat motionless at the table. Behind her, standing in rigid attention, was the family. Her voice broke several times and rose in register as she spoke to Eva. ‘You are never to call, never to visit the grave, never to contact us for any reason again. Never, ever again.’ Jonas’ brothers and sisters all stood stone-faced and unresponsive to Eva’s pleas.
‘Vidma!’ hissed Zoya, crossing herself three times, her rosary beads rattling in her thin white fist, her ferocity silencing Eva.
Eva left the house, her world spinning. These people, who had welcomed her, now sent her away vilified. She was an outcast from the family that had adopted her since she was thirteen. Vidma, a witch — that wounded her deeply.
She returned to her grandparents' house on the outskirts of the city. Henk stood at the doorway and held her close as she wept. This was now the third tragedy within a year: Henk and Aga losing a son, then a daughter-in-law, and now Jonas, the bright lad who dreamed of being an actor. It was almost too much for the three of them to bear.
Something became numb, dead and lifeless inside Eva. All she could see was a creeping darkness. It started at the edges of her vision, peripheral shadows drawing in closer like curtains. She thought at first it was a trick of the light as she brushed her hair first thing in the morning. The mirror on her dresser seemed to have developed a smoky frame.
Her weight dropped and Grandmother Aga fretted. ‘Eat, child, eat,’ she’d whisper into her ear as she placed warm soup and bread on the table, tutting quietly later as she’d take back the untouched food while maintaining a silent perseverance. Any morsel consumed was viewed as a victory.
Before his retirement Henk had lectured English and Classic Philosophy at the Jan Matejko Academy in Krakow. He managed to secure a librarian’s assistant position for Eva there.
Amid the Trappist-quiet halls, Eva began her gradual recuperation. She hid amid shapeless clothes and a plain brown head scarf. She never made eye contact. She sought sanctuary in the library’s books. Drawn to languages, she immersed herself in books alone in her bedroom at night. Henk and Aga began to help her, his natural ear for language beginning to build a bridge to his broken granddaughter. Aga’s German, stilted and guttural, gave Eva a feel for a language. She could sometimes guess ahead of her grandmother what the next sentence was going to be.
For the first time in her life she entered her grandfather’s library, to her simply a vast oaken door secured by a Gothic black lock while she was growing up. Beyond the door stood high bookcases, beautifully fashioned in mahogany, containing wall-to-wall leather-bound volumes accessed with the help of a sliding ladder.
Henk touched her shoulder, the reassurance and strength flowing from his digits into her soul. ‘Stay in here as long as you want, Eva.’ His voice was gentle and mellow, his Polish still carrying a Dutch cadence. It had made her laugh as a child. She loved its sound; it reminded her somehow of treacle.
She whiled away the autumn and winter months there. Henk procured a large well-worn leather armchair for her to coil up in. She read by the firelight. Aga would leave food and tea for her, stepping in quietly and touching Eva’s arm gently, as silent as a ghost.
Henk moved in the piano, a family heirloom, upright and ornately inlaid with delicate flowers, and Eva discovered old studies she’d learned as a child. All the manuscripts of sheet music Eva uncovered were dusted down for her. Sitting at the stool, she set the old wooden metronome and began to learn how to play again. She would lose herself for hours in the music of Johan Sebastian Bach, beginning with the Anna Magdalena notebook.
Slowly as a flower buds, Eva’s soul began to heal.
The following spring semester brought Theo Kassinski. He was tall and lean. Dark curls flowed around his handsome features and he had an innate assurance of his place in the world. He was an unkempt, handsome artist with a smile for her every time he came up to borrow a book. He was looking for a model to draw and he guessed correctly that under her shapeless clothes Eva was a goddess. He asked her to model for him, assuring her he wasn’t interested in her other than her being his contract model. At the desk he had scratched out a quick pencil sketch of her to prove that he could draw. She merely glanced at the sketch — it didn’t move her in any particular way — and agreed with the briefest of nods. On the back of the page he wrote out the address of his studio and handed it to her.
That Saturday she went to the address. The studio, a reconditioned garret above a warehouse, contained a cold water sink, a brass bed and basic kitchenette. Trestle tables lined the far wall with the paraphernalia of his vocation. The room had a co-ordinated chaos about it, where food, drink and clothing lay piled amid oils, canvas, brushes, reams of paper and sheets of hardboard. A screen covered an ornate ancient commode, though rarely as their relationship developed did they avail themselves of it, preferring to take a break at the small cafe across the road, Theo more often than not dappled from head to toe in paint.
She disrobed in the spring sunshine in his studio, moving in poses as Theo sketched her quickly. Both subject and artist took a dispassionate view of each other, and yet Eva found herself every weekend in the studio. They were alone for hours on end, the scratching of pencil, charcoals and pastels marked by the passage of the sun across the wooden floor, the easel a barrier between them.
She allowed her mind to close. Every breath was measured, timed — sometimes short, other times for as long as her lungs would allow. She started to push the limits of her body, twisting herself into complex poses, this breathing exercise making her focus her concentration on the pose relishing, the challenge it presented. A subtle chemistry developed between them where she could almost guess what he was going to ask next. At the end of each session, he would proudly display his renderings as he turned the easel around to her.
For Theo, this arrangement was perfect. Eva never uttered a word, nor sighed, nor complained about having to stand still. He was a rich, bored scion of a local clothing factory owner, though he showed real potential according to some of the gallery owners he had shown his work to. He was Jewish, and always at odds with his father for not attending synagogue and eschewing his heritage and studies. They didn’t square with his chosen nihilistic existence. He would tell her this from behind the easel, usually when he was struggling with his materials. It eased the tension within him. Other than his clashes with his father, she learned he was an only child like her and devoted to his mother.
The months drifted slowly and she watched herself appear more life-like as Theo developed and honed his skills on paper and canvas. Crude charcoal outlines disappeared; shadowing and light became more subtle until he produced a piece unlike anything else he had done.
He had captured her perfectly; Eva was lying naked on the floor, her legs together twisting away from her torso, one arm draped across her breasts, the other arm behind her, spilling lush auburn tresses. It was if she was caught in mid-leap across the sugar paper. He had fashioned a smile on her features, telling her that when she did so, which was rarely, she was a radiant. He opened a bottle of wine and, for the first time in a year, she smiled briefly and Theo was duly mesmerised.
On an impulse, she accompanied him to his bed at the rear of the studio as he took her hand, but the dark edges still hung about her peripheral vision despite his gentle attentive efforts.
‘You know, Eva,’ he said, an ashtray resting on his chest as they shared a cigarette in the tiny metal bed, ‘you should try for the movies. They have a film unit in the university. They’re always looking for actors and actresses.’
She exhaled with one eyebrow raised and a sceptical moue. Smiling, he swept his hand around the room. Eva hadn’t looked around it much. Across every wall pictures of her were pinned up — nude, clothed, sitting, lying, posing, and head and shoulder portrait studies. In every one of them her eyes had a haunted quality, the last and most beautiful image of her at her most wistful.
He stubbed out his cigarette and rose to dress,
‘With your grace, beauty and theatrical training, Eva, it’d be academic you'd have no problems being accepted. I know some of the film students; I could introduce you.’