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84 D Chapter Twenty-Three d boArding School My mother had long toyed with the idea of sending me away to boarding school. She came up with a suitable place,a private institute in Eberswalde,a bleak little town north of Berlin, where mainly daughters of aristocratic descent were accepted. In my mother’s mind, several birds could be killed with one stone. Not only would I be forced into the circles where I belonged, but I would also be removed from the company of Ditte. The two of us had become known in Dahlem as the “diabolical duo.” During the periods between governesses, who could have prevented the worst, we specialized in playing pranks on neighbors that amused few, if any, least of all the local police. We boldly stole flowers from other people’s gardens, bound them into beautiful bouquets, and sold them, sometimes even back to their rightful owners. Using my little brother’s air gun, we became experts in busting windows.After school, disregarding our homework, we would roam the streets on foot, by bicycle or on stilts, in search of trouble. As a consequence, our identical report cards showed an alarming number of failing marks. What had become clear was that our parents seemed unable to cope with such misbehavior . Some of our pranks were reported by my father to the kaiser, but he only laughed. That was easy for him, my father complained. He did not have to live with me. Ditte’s parents were extremely eager to see all this nonsense come to an end, because they now lived in mortal fear that Ditte’s mother’s Jewish identity would be detected. It was still a family secret,and she had masterfully erased and forged some of the names and dates in her family tree, which now revealed that she had only one Jewish grandparent. Married to an “Aryan” husband, the danger of her deportation was drastically reduced. Still, they lived as unobtrusively as possible, avoiding public attention. In boarding school,the company of girls from my own“caste”would not only improve my behavior, but cause present catastrophic marks on my report card to go up. My grandmother was jubilant. Finally! Aside from dreading to leave Dahlem,my parents,my brother,Anna,Ditte,her family, and my freedom behind, one fact caused me grave concern: I would not be able to take the mandatory two years of confirmation instruction,taught by my idol,Pastor Niemoeller.By now, I had developed a full-fledged crush on the pastor. Watching him in the pulpit, dark and handsome,I secretly began to picture myself by his side as the love of his life.Oblivious to the fact that he was a married man with seven children, who never gave me more than They even Closed The Candy sTore 85 an occasional fleeting smile, I found myself drifting into a dream world. The very thought of touching his hand would cause my heart to pound, my face to turn the color of a boiled lobster.Aside from my father, he was the most attractive man I had ever seen. I had reached the heroic decision that, should the Gestapo ever attempt to arrest him in church, I would throw myself between him and his persecutors, relishing the thought of becoming a martyr for his sake. During my last winter at home, Ditte and I had been permitted to join a very exclusive dance circle, where the offspring of carefully chosen families were taught the foxtrot, the tango, the slow and the fast waltz, the forbidden “swing,” and the “Lambeth Walk.” For the first time,we became aware of boys as the other gender,having received stern but enigmatic instructions at home about behavior in the company of fifteen-year-old“males.”Despite my crush on the pastor, which was, to me, almost holy, I had now gotten into the habit of falling in and out of love almost every week, usually with boys who had no use for me, a year younger than the rest of the girls,and unlike Ditte,not having even begun to“develop.”The pink ball gown that my father had picked out for me to wear at the final party somehow did not fit around the chest.Asking Leonore, a rather well-developed Jewish girl in the dancing circle, for her expert advice, she suggested I put cotton into my bra. My what? After Easter vacation in 1937, I was shipped...

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