Page 64 of The German Mother

‘Minki’s tired, obviously.’

‘And the baby?’

He paused.

‘Max?’

‘I think the baby’s all right. It was a Caesarean. The baby needed oxygen.’

‘Well, these things happen, Max…but it’s not out of the ordinary,’ Leila reassured him.

‘Yes, you’re probably right.’

‘Max, please give Minki our love. I’m not sure how easy it would be for us to come and see her right away. We’re both very busy, but I’ll write.’

‘She’d love that. And I suspect we’ll be down in the spring to visit her father – so hopefully you can see them both then.’

A few days later, Leila arrived at work and found Martin Gruber striding around the newsroom in a rage, waving a document in the air and shouting, ‘It’s unbelievable…bloody outrageous…’ Finally he disappeared into his office, slamming the door behind him.

‘What’s the matter with Martin?’ Leila whispered to Julius.

‘Someone’s just sent him a copy of a report from a doctors’ conference in Leipzig.’

‘And?’

‘The main speaker – a ProfessorStaemmler – opened his lecture by discussing the dangers of allowing “inferior” Jews and Germans to breed. Marriages between Germans and Jews, he suggested, must be made illegal. The problem he identified was how to determine who was a Jew.’

‘I’m sorry – but this sounds too ridiculous,’ said Leila.

‘Ridiculous, but true. The professor has come up with a theory based on the amount of Jewish blood a person has in their system.’ Julius glanced down at his notes. ‘Yes, here it is…you are considered Jewish if you have either a Jewish parent or grandparent. You only escape the classification if your Jewish ancestry is more distant – such as traceable to a great-grandparent.’

‘I see,’ said Leila, sinking down onto her chair.

‘Oh…but there’s more. Jews are not Staemmler’s only target,’ Julius went on, ‘he also believes that all serial criminals, prostitutes and those suffering from heritable diseases should be sterilised. Martin is furious and is writing the story himself. Expect fireworks when the paper hits the streets tomorrow.’

Early the next morning, Leila ran down to the communal hall to fetch her copy of the paper. The banner headline was printed in a huge typeface.

EUGENICS IN THE THIRD REICH

Walking back upstairs to her apartment, she skim-read the first paragraph.

ProfStaemmler’s lecture focussed on the need to purify the German race. In his view breeding between ‘inferior’ Jews and Gentiles should be made illegal. Further, he proposes sterilisation of anyone with either a mental or an inheritable physical disease.

In the kitchen, she laid the paper on the table and began to prepare the children’s breakfast.

‘Morning, Mutti,’ said Sofia, standing behind her mother and wrapping her arms round Leila’s waist.

Realising she had left the newspaper on the table, Leila swung round anxiously, hoping to remove it. But Axel had already sat down at the table, and was reading the front page. ‘Mutti, what’s E…U…GEN…ICS?’

Leila was at a loss. Although she had always wanted to be open with her children, some subjects were just too horrific for their young minds to cope with.

To her relief, Viktor came into the kitchen. ‘Come on children, eat up. I’ve got a meeting in half an hour, and I’ve got to drop you both at school first.’

The newspaper headline was lost in the kerfuffle of cramming food into mouths and finding school bags and shoes. But when everyone had left, Leila opened out the newspaper and read the whole article with growing disbelief. The concept of ‘Jewish classification’ and the proposal to make marriage between Jews and Gentiles illegal was appalling, but so was the idea of sterilising anyone with an inheritable disease. What counted, she wondered, as an inheritable disease? Leila had met a couple of children at Sofia’s school who had problems. There was a delightful deaf boy called Pieter, who often came back to the apartment with Sofia. He used sign language and, to her credit, Sofia was doing her best to learn it. Another friend had problems reading. ‘The teacher gets so cross with her, Mutti,’ Sofia had told her, ‘but it’s not fair, because she’s really very clever. She can tell marvellous stories, she just can’t seem to read the words in a book.’

Would those children be classed as suitable for sterilisation, Leila wondered.

It suddenly occurred to her that she had not heard from Minki since the birth of her baby girl. Max had sounded so worried when she was born; now Leila wondered if there was still a problem with the baby. Anxious to be reassured, she put through a long-distance call to Berlin.