building had been turned off, but unbeknownst to anyone, Franz went into the front cellar and turned it on again. Then he boiled my sewing scissors, and boiled more water and brought it back down in a washbasin with the scissors. He got newspaper for the floor. His face was so white. During my previous deliveries he had always waited in the parlor. Now he held my hand. I began to scream. The intensity of the pain was more than it had been during my other labors and I felt sure there was some sort of terrible complication. Still no one in the room moved. The neighbors were silent, their faces, as Franz told me later, white as snow. Frau Schivelbusch held Björn’s head against her chest, although the boy kept twisting backward to see.
Ah, and Franz, poor Franz. Always one never to set foot in a grocer’s shop for it was a woman’s place and not a man’s, who stayed clear of the kitchen, was uncomfortable with the sick—such a man was he. And now here he was, with his sleeves rolled up before the cold eyes of his neighbors, forced to deliver our child like a midwife, his heart beating, his eyes full of fear. I was so proud of him. I don’t remember much of this, but after a time, in a fog of pain and sweat, I began to push the baby. What I do remember is that I was, in those last moments before her birth, happy at last to think that I would see this child. For months I had been willing her to stay inside me forever. She came out, and I cried. Franz washed the baby at my direction on the floor of the cellar, and then he put her to my breast. The child was yellow with jaundice, her skull cone-shaped from the squeezing. I put her face to my face and kissed her, and when the afterbirth came out, we improvised the cutting of the cord, neither of us knowing if we were right. We felt terribly uncertain. I thought my child would die.
In the next weeks, however, the baby thrived against all expectations. And although I never would have expected it, I too survived the birth. We named the baby Beate, a Catholic name, not wanting her to suffer as Rahel had.
To my relief Franz got a letter from the labor department soon after, and started having to go to Fromm in Köpenick. There was a factory there. It took him so long to travel, and he was not paid, we got only the ration cards. But now I felt at least some assurance that he would not be on one of the lists. He spent all day in a room with two massive ovens and a terrible heat, and from morning to night he had to shove a two-ton metal frame in and out of the oven, ruining his fine violinist’s hands. Despite my protests, he shared his meat, fruit, and vegetable rations with me, as I only got Jewish rations, which did not include these things. The result was that he became increasingly thin. But otherwise, he said, how was I to nurse our child? I think it was now becoming clear to Franz that he and I would not survive the war. But he always thought our children would.
Shortly after little Beate’s birth, the Nazis passed an ordinance that Jews could not have household pets, and this included dogs, cats, and canary birds. I was so tired now, I think it was because of that—I “forgot” this ordinance. Ferdinand and Sarto continued to sit in their cage in the living room, cared for with loving constancy by Rahel, who was growing up so quickly.
But Sarto was nothing if not a powerful singer, audible in those early spring months with a trill that blew like dark smoke out our windows. It wasn’t long before I found a note under our front door from Frau Schivelbusch, saying in pinched phrases that it would be better for us if we were to “cease and desist to harbor beasts and fowl reserved for Aryans,” as if we were keeping a zoo! I did not think I could stand another visit from the Gestapo, but I should not have busied my head. The Gestapo came anyway.
Let us simply say: they came and after they left both canaries were gone, the robust Sarto and the ailing Ferdinand. Rahel cried and cried.
What happened