In The Presence Of My Enemies

Alicia's mother and father passed out coats. The friends stood gossiping on the front porch for a last couple of minutes. As they chattered, a brightly lit police van turned the corner and rolled up the street toward the end of the cul-de-sac. "They know!" Alicia gasped in horror. "They know!" She tried to bolt inside, away from the eagle and swastika that had suddenly gone from national emblem to symbol of terror.

Her father seized her arm. Alicia had never thought of him as particularly strong, but he held on tight and made sure she couldn't move. The van turned around and went back up the street. It turned the corner. It was gone.

"There. You see?" her father said. "Everything's fine, little one. They can only find out about us if we give ourselves away. Do you understand?"

"I-think so, Father," Alicia said.

"Good." Her father let go of her. "Nowyou can go on in and get ready for bed."

Alicia had never been so glad to go into the house in all her life.

Susanna and the Stutzmans walked off toward the bus stop. Heinrich and Lise Gimpel went back inside the house. Once he closed the door, he allowed himself the luxury of a long sigh of mingled relief and fear. "That damned police van!" he said. "I thought poor Alicia would jump right out of her skin-and if she had, it might have ruined everything."

"Well, she didn't. You stopped her." His wife gave him a quick kiss. "I'm going to make sure she's all right now."

"Good idea," Heinrich said. "I'll start on the dishes." He rolled up his sleeves, turned on the water, and waited for it to get hot. When it did, he rinsed off the plates and silverware and glasses and loaded them into the dishwasher. The manufacturers kept saying the new models would be able to handle dishes that hadn't been rinsed. So far, they'd lied every time.

Heinrich was still busy when Alicia came out for a goodnight kiss. Usually, that was just part of nighttime routine. It felt special tonight.

He said, "You don't have to be frightened every second, darling. If you show you're afraid, people will start wondering what you have to be afraid of. Keep on being your own sweet self, and no one will ever suspect a thing."

"I'll try, Papa." When Alicia hugged him, she clung for a few extra seconds. He squeezed her and ran his hand through her hair. "Good night," she said, and hurried away.

He let out another sigh, even longer than the first. Finding out you were a Jew in the heart of the National Socialist Germanic Empire was not something anyone, child or adult, could fully take in at a moment's notice. A beginning of acceptance was as much as he could hope for. That much, Alicia had given him.

His own father had shown him photographs smuggled out of the Ostlands and other, newer, ones from the USA to warn him how necessary silence was. He still had nightmares about those pictures after more than thirty years. But he still had the photos, too, hidden in a file cabinet. If he thought he had to, he would show them to Alicia. He hoped the need would never come, for her sake and his own.

Lise walked into the kitchen a couple of minutes later. She dragged in a chair from the dining room, sat down, and waited till the sink was empty and the washer full. Then, as the machine started to churn, she got up and gave him a long, slow hug. "And so the tale gets told once more," she said.

As he had with his daughter, Heinrich hung on to his wife. "And so we try to go on for another generation," he said. "We've outlasted so much. God willing, we'll outlast the Nazis, too. No matter what they teach in school, I don't believe the Reich can last a thousand years."

"Alevaiit doesn't." Lise used a word from a murdered language, a word that hung on among surviving Jews like the ghost of Hamlet's murdered father. "But, of course, now that the tale is told, the risk that we'll get caught also goes up. You did just right there, keeping her from running when the police van came by."

"Couldn't have that," Heinrich said gravely. "But she'll be nervous for a while now, and she's so young…" He shook his head. "Strange how the worst danger comes from making sure we go on. No one would ever suspect you or me-"

"Why else buy pork?" Lise broke in. "Why else have a Bible with the New Testament in it, too? Because we'd have to want to commit suicide if we used one that didn't, that's why."

"I know." Heinrich knew more intimately than that: he still had his foreskin. He took off his glasses, wiped his forehead with his sleeve, and set the spectacles back on his nose. "We do everything we can to seem like perfect Germans. I can quote from Mein Kampf more easily than from Scripture. But it's not so easy for a child. I remember."

Lise nodded. "So do I."

"And we still have two more to go." Heinrich let out yet another sigh. He hugged her again. "I'm so tired."

"I know," she said. "It must be easier for me, staying home with the Kinder like a proper Hausfrau. But you have to wear the mask at the office every day."