The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,118
over, here we are, it’s come to pass: We’ve flown up. We’ve come and gone. We’re diamonds of the night sky.
I came from Posen. I came from Posen to the big city. I came to my husband, we were married, we had a child, and when the government changed, I took refuge in a new church, the church that would save me but did not.
Where to start the story of how things went wrong? It began much earlier, but I’ll start in the summer of 1939, as that is when, for me at least, our death began seeping in.
Nineteen thirty-nine we got a canary for Rahel’s birthday. She was turning seven years old, old enough to care for the bird herself, we thought, a precocious little girl. Gerda had been born that winter, I was often tired, the baby didn’t sleep through the night. Rahel could use a little amusement at home. Many of her friends had left Germany already. She was at the school with the gentiles, but they knew she was of mixed birth, and did not play with her. She was a lonely, quiet child. Our apartment was often as silent as if we had never had any children.
We went to a place. You could buy birds there, on the corner of Fuggerstrasse and Motzstrasse, in a fine, stylish apartment house. The bird seller lived all the way at the top, under the roof, in a sort of garret with a winter garden built out of glass. Being on the corner and up under the roof, the place was struck with sunlight, and it was dreadfully hot, with large, blazing windows. It smelled wretched. A Jewish man by the name of Apfelbein who had been run out of business by the Nazis was trying to make a living in secret; he was thin. Officially he merely had a lot of birds that he cared for, and sometimes he gave them to his friends who wanted them as pets. If we made him a gift of some money in return, then no one had to be the wiser. In the old days before ’38 he had had a large pet shop on the Kurfürstendamm that even sold fancy-breed ponies in the courtyard behind.
We asked for Herr Apfelbein’s advice, but he did not speak to us in reply, he spoke to Rahel directly, told her about birds in a way she could understand. Rahel was a shy child. There weren’t many who could draw her into conversation, but he seemed to have a way with children, and soon she was speaking freely with him. He pointed out several birds in the row of cages, and she became excited. She was already quite overstimulated—it being her birthday. She liked two of the canaries. You could see why she chose them. They stood out—one was a vibrant yellow and the other a bright white. In the spirit of the occasion, her father and I told her she could choose whichever one she liked. She went back and forth between the two, talking to each bird in a soft, singsong voice, asking, “Would you like to come home with me, little bird?” She even went so far as to name them both—the white Sarto and the yellow Ferdinand. But she made no move to choose. After half an hour, we felt embarrassed—Gerda was starting to cry in my arms—and Herr Apfelbein began to look at us with interest to see what we would do.
We thought maybe, since the birds were not expensive (Herr Apfelbein was ready to give them to us for almost any price), we would buy both. Franz was still working at the time. Rahel smiled at the idea and looked at us triumphantly. I remember she had most of her milk teeth still, being a little behind for her age. But Herr Apfelbein shook his head.
“Don’t get two birds, young lady,” he said, addressing Rahel, “unless you have a lot of space for two cages. If you have both in one cage, one of the birds will die. Not right away, but after one year, maybe two years—one of them will die.”
We looked down at Rahel, who showed no reaction to this news. She stuck her finger through the bars at the white bird and cooed at it softly.
All of a sudden, with the strict, schoolmarmish air I knew meant she was happy, Rahel spoke. “Which one?”