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35. The War Comes Closer to Home
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130 D Chapter Thirty-Five d the War Comes Closer to home Before 1941 ended, our friends Otto and Edith Stargardt were evicted from their spacious home on Schorlemerallee in Dahlem. They were issued a new domicile on the second floor of a so-called“Judenhaus”(“Jew house”) right around the corner from us, owned by an elderly couple living in a“privileged marriage,”meaning that the husband was Jewish and the wife was Aryan. Uncle Otto and Aunt Edith were permitted to take some furniture as well as other personal belongings. The fact that they both had been inducted as forced laborers at the Siemenswerke,in the north of Berlin,led them to believe that they were exempt from deportation. Each day at dawn, the old couple, wearing their yellow stars, set off on foot for the two-hour walk to work, returning home late at night. Grateful still to live among friends, all of whom contributed to their livelihood, they bore their hard lot with dignity and amazing stamina. For years Otto had rejected the urgent invitations from his wife’s son to join him in America.They were even in possession of a visa,which was now void,since the United States had entered the war against Nazi Germany. The former high-ranking judge, a decorated veteran, had steadfastly ignored the impending consequences, maintaining that, since they had not done anything wrong, nothing bad would happen to them. So far, unlike the overwhelming majority of German Jews, they had miraculously been spared abuse and maltreatment .In Otto’s opinion,even Hitler had to respect those German Jews who had proven their patriotism and courage in World War I, when Jewish officers and soldiers had fought alongside their Christian comrades.At a time when Jews had just begun to disappear rather than be carted to an unknown destination, Otto deemed all suggestions to go into hiding as undignified. He seemed almost relieved when, in the spring of 1942, the inevitable happened . The Gestapo barged into the Judenhaus and announced that Otto Israel and Edith Sarah Stargardt were to report to the Grunewald railroad station the following morning for deportation. The sooner we go, Otto imagined, the sooner we will be back home again. His logic was breathtaking.9 The Stargardts were ordered to pack a suitcase with the bare necessities and move downstairs to spend the night with the other inhabitants of the house. The doors to their rooms were then sealed, and all their belongings were confiscated, to be picked up the next day. Confiscated? Meaning that all those beautiful things that they had been able to save Destruction unlimiteD 131 from their house would fall into the filthy hands of those savages? My mother perked up her ears, which meant that this would most likely not happen as long as she had her way. With my father out of town and Uncle Otto considered useless in illegal undertakings , the two women worked out a hair-raising scheme. My cunning mother, in her infinite resourcefulness and with the help of a ladder, determined that the balcony door was not sealed; it was not even locked. All they had to do was wait until nightfall in order to carry out a sinister plot, which required fervent prayers that no air raid or nosy neighbor might bring the devious action they planned—and possibly their lives—to an untimely end. The new moon was on their side, and soon the blackout, usually cursed but in this case highly praised, wrapped the residential streets of Dahlem in pitch-black darkness. The little wagon, in which my brother and I had spent happy childhood hours, was the designated moving van, the only possible means by which as much furniture as possible could be carted to our house. Once a mere toy, it had lately advanced to the status of a multipurpose vehicle, suitable for carting wood and coal rations as well as horse manure for the garden in the summer,pine cones for heating the stove in the winter,and transporting suitcases to the bus stop or debris to the garbage dump. Using utmost caution, flashlight in hand, my mother was the one to climb bravely up the ladder and enter the Stargardts’ apartment through the unlocked balcony door. Aunt Edith, not fit for such acrobatic ventures, was sure the Gestapo official had not yet bothered to take inventory, so they might as well settle for the most valuable pieces. Aunt...