Departures

“Is Anna filthy?” Lise Gimpel asked.

“Of course not,” Alicia said indignantly. She looked to her friend as if wanting Anna to tell her this was all just a game. But Anna looked back with impressively adult solemnity; she knew what rode on holding this secret close.

“Are your father and I wicked?” Lise persisted. “Is Susanna diseased?”

“I can get to feel that way, the morning after too much Scotch,” Susanna said.

“Hush, Susanna,” Lise said.

“But-what happens if anyone else finds out I’m-I’m a Jew?” Alicia said. She pronounced the name with difficulty; it was too strong a curse to find in the mouth of a well-brought-up ten-year-old. “If my friends at school know, they won’t like me anymore.”

“It will be worse than that, dear, if your friends at school find out,” Heinrich Gimpel said. “If anyone learns you’re a Jew, the Einsatzkommandos will come for you, and for your sisters, and for your mother and me, and for the Stutzmans, and for Susanna.” He made his voice hard and implacable, impressing on his daughter that he meant exactly what he said.

Lise tried to soothe Alicia. “No one has to find out, my little one. No one will unless you give yourself away, and us with you. We are well hidden these days, those few of us who are left.” Even her sunny spirit was not proof against the memory of the millions who had died, first in Europe and then, a generation later, in the Vernichtungslagers outside New York and Los Angeles. Shaking her head, she repeated, “We are well hidden.”

“My father helped there,” Walther said. “He altered the Reich’s genealogical data base to show us all to be of pure Aryan blood. No one looks for us any more, not here in the heart of the Germanic Empire. No one thinks there is any reason to look. We are safe enough unless we give ourselves away. One day, maybe, not in our time but when your sons or grandsons have grown up, Alicia, it may be safe for us to live openly as what we are once more. Till then, we go on.”

Alicia tossed her head wildly back and forth; her eyes were wide and staring, like those of a trapped animal. “It will never be safe! Never! The Reich will last for a thousand years, and how can there be room in it for Jews?”

“Maybe the Reich will last a thousand years, as Hitler promised,” Heinrich said. “No one can know that until it happens, if it does. But there have been Jews, Alicia, for close to three thousand years already. Even if the Germanic Empire lives out its whole time, it will still be a baby beside us. One way or another, as Uncle Walther said, we go on. It’s hard to pretend not to be what we really are-”

“I hate it,” Susanna Weiss broke in.

“We all hate it,” Gimpel continued. “But when times are dangerous for Jews, as they are now, what other choice do we have?”

“This isn’t the first time Jews have had to be what they are only in secret,” Esther Stutzman said. “In Spain a long time ago, we pretended to be good Catholics. Now we have to pretend to be good National Socialists. But underneath, we still are what we are.”

“I don’t want to be a Jew!” Alicia shouted, so loud that Heinrich looked nervously toward the windows. If one of the neighbors heard, the Security Police were only a phone call away.

He took a deep breath. “You have a way out, Alicia.” She stared at him, tears and questions in her eyes. He said, “You can just pretend this night never happened. You know we will never betray you, no matter what you decide. If you choose not to tell your husband one day, if he is not one of us, and if you choose not to tell your children, they will never know you-and they-are Jewish. They’ll be just like everyone else in the Germanic Empire. But one more piece of something old and precious will have gone out of the world forever.”

“I don’t know what to do,” Alicia said, the most adult sentence that had ever crossed her lips.

“It’s not so bad, Alicia,” Anna Stutzman said. “I cried, too, when I found out.”

“So did I,” Gottlieb added, which made Alicia’s eyes widen; he was so much older than she that she thought of him as practically a grownup.

Anna went on. “But it’s special in a way, like being part of a club that won’t take just anybody. And it’s not like what we are is written on our foreheads or anything like that, even though it does feel that way at first. But if we keep the secret, no one will find out what we are. We even have our own special holidays-today is one.”

“What’s today?” Alicia asked.

“Today is the festival of Purim,” her father answered. “The Germans and the Spaniards Aunt Esther was talking about were not the first people to want to get rid of the Jews. We’ve always stood out a little because we’re different from the other people in a country. And a long time ago, in the Persian Empire-”