Echoes Page 0,63
years, she had nonetheless been born Jewish and the girls were half Jewish. She was afraid it could make trouble for them if things got worse. Poorer Jews, and those without power and connections, had been shipped off to work camps for the past two years. Although Jacob insisted it could never happen to them. Those being sent away were “marginals,” or so the Nazis claimed. Convicts, criminals, loiterers, Gypsies, unemployed, troublemakers, Communists, radicals, and people who couldn't support themselves. But now and then people they knew remotely were caught up in it. Monika had a cleaning woman whose brother had been sent to the camp at Dachau, and subsequently her entire family was sent away, but admittedly her brother was a political activist, who had printed leaflets against the Nazis, so he had brought it on himself and his family. But still, Monika was deeply concerned. Little by little, Jews were being squeezed out of productive society, singled out, and hampered at every turn. If things got worse, she didn't want anything to happen to Beata and the girls. And Beata had thought of it herself. They had no one to protect them and, if trouble happened, nowhere to turn.
“I don't think they'll cause problems for people like us, Mama,” Beata said quietly. Monika always worried about how thin she was too. She had always been slight, but in recent years she was wraithlike, and without makeup her face was startlingly pale. She had worn black and no other color since Antoine's death. And overnight, it had turned her into a seemingly much older woman. She had closed her doors to the world, and all she had in her life now was her children. And at last, her mother once again.
“What about the children's papers?” Monika asked with concern.
“They don't really have any. All they have are student cards with ‘Vallerand’ on them, they were born Catholic. I'm Catholic. Our parish knows us well. I don't think it ever occurs to anyone that I wasn't born Catholic. And since we came here from Switzerland, I think some people think we're Swiss. Even my marriage certificate to Antoine shows that we were both Catholic when we married. My passport expired years ago, and the girls never had any. Amadea was a baby when we came back, and she came in on mine. No one's going to pay any attention to a widow with two daughters with a noble French name. I'm listed everywhere as the Comtesse de Vallerand. I think we're safe, as long as we don't draw attention to ourselves. I worry more about the rest of you.”
Everyone in Cologne knew the Wittgensteins and that they were Jewish. The fact that they had banished Beata two decades before and listed her as dead would protect her in a way, and her mother was grateful for that now. The rest of the family was far more visible, which was both good and bad. They assumed that the Nazis were not going to single out a family as respectable as theirs to persecute. As many were, they were convinced that it was the little people, the loose ends of society that they were after, as Jacob said. But anti-Semitism had certainly become the order of the day, and both her sons admitted that they were concerned. Both Horst and Ulm worked at the bank with Jacob, who was thinking of retiring. He was seventy years old. In the photographs Beata now saw of him, he looked distinguished but ancient. She worried that in disappointing him, she had contributed to his looking so old. Unlike her mother, he looked older than his years. Amadea refused to even look at the photographs of him. And Daphne said he looked scary. Their Oma wasn't.
She always brought them little presents, which delighted them. Over time, she had given Beata a few small pieces of her jewelry. She couldn't give her anything important, for fear that Jacob would notice. She told him she had lost the small things, and he chided her for being careless. But he was often forgetful now, too, so he didn't scold her too much. They were both getting old.
The only real concern Beata had about their Jewish origins was Amadea's desire to go to university. She was desperate to study philosophy and psychology, and literature, as her mother had wanted to do before her, and wasn't allowed to by her father. Now it was the Nazis keeping Amadea from it. Beata