this way.” She had a strange, almost severe expression on her face, so I didn’t argue with her, even though I was more inclined to agree with what she said yesterday about it being because of the bomb. But then, of course, what do I know about anything, and anyway, as far as I could see, this other way was more to her liking. We said good-bye soon after that, as I had to go to work the next day, but when I took her hand, she dug sharply into my palm with her fingernails. I understood it was her way of hinting at our secret, and the look on her face was as if to say “everything’s okay.”
The next day, though, her behavior was decidedly odd. In the afternoon, having come back from work and first washed myself down, changed shirt and shoes, and run a wet comb through my hair, I went with her to visit the sisters, because Annamarie had in the meantime carried out her original plan of arranging to introduce me to them. Their mama too was pleased to welcome me (their father is away on labor service). They have a fair-sized apartment with a balcony, carpets, a couple of larger rooms, and a separate, smaller room for the two girls. This is furnished with a piano and lots of dolls and other girlish knickknacks. We usually play cards, but today the older sister was not in the mood. She wanted to talk to us first about something that has been preoccupying her recently, since the yellow star has been giving her plenty to puzzle over. In fact, it was “people’s looks” that had woken her up to the change, because she finds that people’s attitudes toward her have altered, and she can see from their looks that they “hate” her. She had observed that this morning as well, while she was out shopping for her mama. To my way of thinking, though, she was making a bit too much of it. My own experience, at any rate, is not quite the same. At the workplace, for instance, everyone knows that some of the bricklayers there can’t stand Jews but they have still become quite friendly with us boys. Not that this does anything to change their views, of course. Then again, the example of the baker came to mind, so I attempted to explain to the girl that they did not really hate her, that is to say not her personally, since they have no way of knowing her, after all—it was more just the idea of being “Jewish.” She then said she’d been thinking the same thing right before, because when you get down to it she doesn’t even know exactly what “Jewish” is. Annamarie, admittedly, said to her that everyone knows: it’s a religion. What interested her, however, was not that but its “sense.” “After all, people must know why they hate,” she reckoned. She confessed that at first she’d been unable to make any sense of the whole thing, and it had hurt her terribly that they despised her “merely because she is Jewish”; that’s when she had felt for the first time that, as she put it, something singles her out from those people, she belongs to some other category. That had started her thinking, and she had tried to find out more about it all from books and conversations, which was how she had come to recognize that they hated her precisely for that. It was her view, in fact, that “we Jews are different from other people,” and that difference was the crux of it, that’s why people hate Jews. She also remarked how peculiar it was to live “being aware of that differentness,” and that sometimes she felt a sort of pride but at other times more a shame of sorts because of it. She wanted to know how we felt in regard to our differentness, whether we were proud of it or rather ashamed. Her younger sister and Annamarie didn’t really know; I myself hadn’t so far been able to find a reason for these feelings either. Anyway, a person cannot entirely decide for himself about this differentness: in the end, that is precisely what the yellow star is there for, as far as I know. I told her as much, but she dug her heels in: the difference is “carried within ourselves.” According to me, however, what we wear on the outside is the more