No Going Back by Anna Patrick

Author:Anna Patrick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
Published: 2019-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

One day, not long after the storm troopers incident, Heinz brought home a poster of a horrid-looking person. Hairy like an ape, a huge pock marked nose, tiny pig-like eyes with an evil expression in them. A grotesque image which made me shiver.

Heinz said: ‘This is what a Jew looks like. If you come across one like this, you must inform me straightaway. Have you?’

He often asked me and I didn’t understand why. But even when I walked past Jewish shops and customers, I never met a Jew like the one on the poster. And slowly, slowly, I realised what he had been trying to tell me. Jews don’t look like that or like the other horrible posters you used to get around the city. And if they don’t look like that why believe anything else they say about them?

When Hitler told us about Jewish conspiracies, I believed him. I couldn’t explain it to you but I didn’t feel I needed to. It was enough that I trusted him to know how it worked and what he needed to do about it. Now I’m not so sure.

I continued to visit Frau Rose but one day, much later, I knocked on the door and another woman said she lived there now. Frau Weber told me she was Jewish, so the Party ordered her to leave and a local official and his family took her home. What a sour face she had when she told me, saying she wanted the building disinfected to get rid of any traces of vermin. That was the word she used, vermin. Like the rats on Papa’s farm.

Sometimes I wish Heinz had been a farmer, a son of the soil bringing home the harvest for the good of his family and all of Germany. I know he’s not as happy in the Gestapo as he used to be in the Kripo but that’s not surprising when you see how people react to him. They’re either scared witless or keen to give him information about somebody they know or more likely don’t like.

I’m not really sure what it is he does in the Gestapo. He told me their work was to protect the state against its enemies, but he wasn’t allowed to talk about it in any detail. I asked him once why he had transferred across. He told me he had been invited to join and that he didn’t feel it was wise to refuse. It was the same when he joined the Party. Then, no sooner had he joined both, we were being offered a much larger apartment in a very nice, respectable street. So I think he made the right decision.

On Sunday, 2nd August 1936, my labour pains started a month early. Little Carola seemed in such a hurry to come into the world and so disappointed once she got here. She was a tiny little mite, and all she seemed capable of doing was crying.

Heinz and I worried. The doctor said we needn’t, that

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