They'll Have to Catch Me First: An Artist's Coming of Age in the Third Reich

Eight

E i g h t MR.HERSCH BECAME EUGENE. My demanding teacher changed into a gentle, understanding lover, and a day that had started on a very ugly note ended in the most beautiful evening. It was hard to believe — the mature man of my dreams was actually in love with me. That he was a little over-ripe did not matter. I would have loved nothing better than to crawl into the pocket of his smock for the duration of the Third Reich, a thousand years Hitler promised. For all I cared my teacher could go on painting instead of me — he was better anyway , and I would not have to continue searching for my own style. Having talent may be a good thing, but it leaves you with no peace. Like a slave driver it pushes you on. Woe to the artist who tries to take it easy. One look in the mirror drives the lazy genius to pick up his brushes and paint a self-portrait. Eugene often sighed that he would like to live his next life as a unionized janitor. On a beautiful autumn day, we walked arm in arm through the rustling, dry leaves of the Tiergarten. By the Landwehr Canal, where as a child I had seen the liebe Gott, we stood waiting until a barge passed under the bridge.Torrents of water rushed and swirled out of the lock. My feet were icy, my head felt hot and strangely light, but still I was totally happy. As Eugene walked me home, we wondered why so many people were in the street reading the paper. We found out when we passed a kiosk. Huge headlines — a Jew had shot an attaché of the German Embassy in Paris.Then the news came that the attaché had died. 118 I r e n e Aw r e t I was shivering less from fear than from the fever I was developing. Feeling better the next morning, I walked to the studio as usual. I stayed only long enough to listen to an announcement by a foreign radio station. In Paris a seventeen-year old Jewish refugee had committed a crazed act of desperation. His family, the same as my friend Ruth Klausner’s, had been chased from Germany over the border into Poland without warning, without money, having had to leave everything behind. The teen-age son, studying in Paris, intended to take revenge on the German Ambassador there. By mistake he killed the third attaché. For the rest of the day I lay dozing in bed at Miss Hopp’s; she brought me aspirin and said that outside all was quiet. For once we seemed to be getting away with only the threats printed in the papers and flooding the airways. For the next 24 hours I felt terrible, though not even a temperature of 103ºF could dampen my appetite. I gratefully accepted my landlady’s offer to buy a pork chop and can of applesauce for me.When she returned,she was too upset to speak. The shop windows of the Jewish-owned pharmacy had been completely shattered — S.A. men were all over the place preventing people from entering. Many other Jewish shops had been ransacked. Everywhere she went she had to maneuver her way through broken glass. “Wild horses cannot drag me out into the streets again.A pogrom, that’s what is going on there,” she said, repeating “pogrom” over and over. Miss Hopp then went into the kitchen to fry my chop. My fever was gone on the following morning. Pogroms in the middle of the twentieth century, I thought on the way to Hardenberg Street. The word conveyed memories of the cruel stories in my Jewish history book, those pages with horrible old woodcuts of basins filled with the blood of Christian children illustrating medieval accusations of ritual murder. However, I used to turn the pages as fast as I could, as I always did with grim stories. Miss Hopp must have been exaggerating with her stories of “pogroms.” Perhaps she wanted to dramatize the risk she took in shopping for me. However, I soon saw for myself the shattered shop windows and shuttered doors. In addition to the T h e y ’ l l H a v e t o C a t c h M e F i r s t 119 crudely...