Mädel sang anthems to the Führer and the Fatherland. Transfixed with foreboding, Sara felt herself shrinking inwardly the more the audience roared approval. She knew the spectacle was designed to inspire Hitler’s worshippers and intimidate everyone else, and she hated to feel its power working upon herself.
Day by day, the pageant at the parade grounds varied little—marchers, songs, speeches by party dignitaries, displays of reinvigorated military might—but on the evening of September 15, the rally would culminate in the much-anticipated announcement of new party policies.
Natan managed to claim two places for them in the press box at Congress Hall, modeled after the Colosseum in Rome, with seating for more than fifty thousand. As they awaited the first speaker, Sara quietly debated the possibilities with a few members of the foreign press she had befriended. As their predictions grew more and more dire, they concluded that whatever Hitler and his inner circle had devised would inevitably be worse than anything they had yet imagined.
Before long, Göring took the stage. After a brief preface, he began to praise the Weimar flag, calling it “the symbol of national glory in the days before the war,” which even afterward had remained “encased in glory.” In the future the Nazis expected the old Imperial flag to be treated with respect, but, he noted, tapping the podium with a forefinger for emphasis, “in the struggles for the regeneration of Germany the swastika has become for us a holy symbol.” For that reason, the current German flag would be retired, superseded by the swastika banner of the National Socialists.
“Well, why not?” said Natan ironically. “The Nazi Party has become the state and the state is the party.”
“It’s wrong,” said Sara, indignant. “Germany and the Nazi Party are not one and the same.”
But even as she spoke, she wondered if that were true anymore.
Then Göring announced two additional laws, cruel and chilling, his words so unbelievable and wrong that they pinned her in place, trembling, unable to cover her ears or look away.
The first was the Reich Citizenship Law, which redefined citizenship based upon parentage rather than birthplace. Jews were identified as “not of German blood” and were thereby stripped of their citizenship and all associated civil rights, including the right to vote. Even Jews who had converted to Christianity were bound by the decree.
Then Göring announced the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor.
“In bygone years, the German people have suffered much from the unpardonable sin of racial impurity,” he shouted, to a thunderous roar of accord from the audience. “German women must be protected against racial contamination.”
To that end, marriages between Germans and Jews were henceforth forbidden. Marriages made in violation of the law were declared void, and extramarital relations between Germans and “non-Aryans” were prohibited. Marriages conducted abroad with the intention of circumventing the decree would not be recognized in Germany. In order to prevent the defilement of German domestic servants by Jewish employers, Jews could no longer hire German women under the age of forty-five years. Violators were subject to punishments including fines, imprisonment, or, in the most egregious circumstances, hard labor at a concentration camp.
Sickened, Sara forgot to take notes, her hands clenched around her pad and pencil until her knuckles turned white and her fingers ached. It did not matter. Every provision of the abhorrent new laws was seared into her memory.
Eventually the rally ended. Sara and Natan collected their luggage from his friend’s home and traveled back to Berlin. Unnerved and shaken, Sara felt as if she had aged a year since she had last sat aboard a train. Only a few days before, she was German, a citizen of the country of her birth. Now, following a rubber-stamp vote in the Reichstag and the stroke of a pen, she was stateless, a woman without a homeland. Or so the law decreed, although she felt no less German than before.
Reports of the new laws had already been widely published by the time Sara and Natan arrived home, and yet their parents hastened to meet them in the foyer, ashen-faced, seeking verification, hoping in vain that the press had misrepresented the new decrees. Natan confirmed their worst fears and divulged something they had not yet read in the papers: The new laws revoked all exemptions for Jewish veterans of the Great War. The modest protection their father’s past honorable service had provided the Weitz family was no more.
“I fought for this country,” Sara’s father said, pained and bewildered, sinking