Page 59

That was another voice Lili didn’t want in her head: Herr Posner, her father’s solicitor, and one of his oldest friends.

He hadn’t been happy at all when she’d sat in his office in the week after her father’s death and declared that she was leaving, that she was going to take her inheritance and build a new life in Berlin.

He’d told her that was shock talking, which it may have been, but he hadn’t changed her mind.

Lili had, however, agreed to make a plan.

She didn’t want Herr Posner holding her future to ransom because he thought she was deluded by grief and incapable of making good choices.

She’d proved to him how well she could balance a set of books.

She’d let him make enquiries about flower businesses which might be available for sale in Berlin, and about respectable areas for a young woman on her own to live.

And when he’d finally signed all the documents she needed to access her father’s estate, she’d persuaded him – by threatening to walk round the city’s less reputable pubs until she found someone to help her – to obtain a set of papers that gave her a new name.

He’d done it in the end, but he’d still been trying to persuade her that new didn’t always mean safety until the day that she left.

He may be right; there may be danger here too. But I’m not the same girl I was in Leipzig. I won’t be afraid of them.

It was a brave hope, but it wasn’t true.

All it took was a drumbeat and a flag. All it took was the first notes of that godforsaken song and suddenly Lili was frozen to the spot with fear, and Berlin and the present whirled away.

‘Storm! Storm! Storm!

Ring the bells from tower to tower!’

‘Not again. You think they’d be tired of all the marching and the yelling by now. It never ends.’

Lili looked up from the bridal headpiece she was weaving as Else pushed the damp hair from her eyes. The older woman’s face was as faded as her work apron; she was wilting quicker than the shop’s flowers in the August heat.

She’s tired; she’s ready to stop working. She’d be glad to let me step in and run the business instead.

Lili had already told her father that Else was desperate to retire from her position as the flower shop’s manager.

She’d also told him that she was ready to be finished with school and start running the family business herself.

She’d left him in no doubt about her views on the subject.

Unfortunately, Benjamin – who’d indulged his daughter’s every other whim since her mother had died of Spanish flu in 1919 – was proving unexpectedly stubborn over this one.

Every time she brought the subject up, his response was the same.

‘You’re only seventeen and – despite how much time you’ve spent there and how much you think you know – you’re not ready to take up your mother’s mantle. I’ll consider the matter in a year or two perhaps, but certainly not before.’

Benjamin had become a brick wall, impervious to Lili’s ambitions, and her frustration had become a dead weight.

Following in her mother’s footsteps as a florist was all Lili had dreamed of since Marie had sat her little daughter on the counter top and taught her that flowers had their own language.

It was all she thought about as she chewed her pencil in the schoolroom, longing for the moment when she would be released back to wrapping bouquets and delighting the customers with her clever choices.

Imagining them telling their friends that Lili Krauss was a magician, just like her mother had been.

‘Lili, are you listening? Can’t you hear them? We need to close up and get going. I’ve no intention of getting caught up in their games.’

The thump of boots against cobbles and the roar of voices finally broke through.

Lili stopped daydreaming about building a chain of shops under her brilliant management and turned towards the window.

Games wasn’t the right word. Nothing about the SA – or the brownshirts, as everyone called the latest bully boys running wild around Leipzig – was playful.

Especially when it came to their hatred of the city’s Jewish population.

‘Ring the dead out of the grave!

Germany, awake! Awake!’

Lili shuddered as the lyrics stormed through the still air and in through the open door. That song was bad. The one which included the line ‘Only when Jews bleed, are we liberated’ made her feel sick.

She dropped the rosebud-studded coronet and crossed to the doorway.

She could see the first line of marchers now, waving their flags with the broken cross symbol.

The Sturmabteilung, or the SA as it was commonly known, behaved like an army, although it wasn’t one, not officially anyway.

Its members referred to themselves as storm troopers – an expression everyone now used as if it was perfectly normal.

They called themselves the protectors of the National Socialists, a new political party which was apparently determined to turn Germany back into the great world power it had been before the war.

Lili shuddered as the ugly voices grew louder.

She was as patriotic as the next person, but she didn’t understand the angry Germany these men wanted to build.

They were thugs; they seemed more motivated by hatred than the desire to create anything good.

And Else was right: being inside a shop which was known to be Jewish-owned and was directly on their parade route was not a safe place to be.

‘Go out the back way, I’ll lock up.’ She brushed away Else’s half-hearted protest. ‘Father’s supposed to be coming from the synagogue to walk me home.

He’ll know better than to go outside in the middle of this, but you know what he’s like – he fusses; he won’t want to break an arrangement.

I’ll go over there to him instead – it’s not far.

I’ll slip in through the back door and wait inside with him until this horror show’s marched past.’

It was a sensible plan, designed to keep everyone out of harm’s way. Except Benjamin didn’t know better and the mock-soldiers didn’t march past and the sensible plan didn’t work.

As Lili stepped out onto the pavement and locked the shop up, there he was. Walking down the steps, lost in thought, barely glancing at the hate-filled men streaming towards him and hurling insults at the synagogue and the good people who worshipped there.

He thinks he’s protected. He thinks they won’t hurt him.

Benjamin was as stubborn in that belief as he was in his determination to keep Lili in school.

‘I did my duty. I fought in the war. I’ve proved that I’m a true German. All this nonsense has nothing to do with me.’

That was his other favourite refrain.

Benjamin held on to his years of service in the Great War as if they’d forged him a suit of armour.

He never left the house without the red, gold and black ribbon of his veteran’s insignia pinned to his lapel.

Being a soldier made him walk tall; it defined him.

His war stories were proud things, full of heroes and sacrifice.

Unfortunately, the increasingly vocal and popular National Socialist Party didn’t share that view.

They’d started to accuse the Jewish troops who’d fought as bravely as anyone for the four long years the war lasted of being ‘shirking soldiers’.

Liars who’d put on a uniform to make themselves look loyal and then ducked out of the battles, or worked as spies and turncoats on behalf of the enemy.

They’d started to blame the ‘Jewish profiteers’ who’d ‘milked the war for their own ends’ too.

Benjamin dismissed the hatred as nonsensical, as a crank’s point of view.

He refused to believe that the party’s leader, Adolf Hitler, who he referred to as ‘the little thug’, could ever win over good hearts and minds.

Or that that the NSP’s virulent antisemitism would ever be tolerated in a country as decent as Germany.

And he was proud to be Jewish, but he was prouder still to be German.

He said that so often – despite the increasing provocation on the streets – the synagogue’s normally mild-mannered rabbi had started to lose patience.

It was a principled position to take, and Lili was proud of her father for speaking up for the truth. Unfortunately, on the tenth of August 1928, neither principles nor the truth mattered.

Nobody could explain afterwards how the fighting began.

Everybody knew that, when the SA were marching, fighting always followed.

Perhaps it was the communists – riled up by the vicious and antagonistic songs they were meant to be riled up by – who started the violence.

Perhaps it was Leipzig’s ordinary citizens, sick of seeing their streets taken hostage and still under the illusion they could fight back.

Or perhaps it was the SA members themselves – throwing a few punches inside their own ranks, knowing that those punches would spill out and provoke.

Not that who started it mattered, in the end.

The marching columns broke formation; the synagogue steps disappeared.

Lili stood paralysed as Benjamin lost his footing.

As he was engulfed. She moved then. She ran towards him and she started to scream.

It was too late. By the time the police decided that things had gone too far – or far enough – Benjamin was a crumpled shape on the ground. Bleeding. Not breathing. Gone.

And I didn’t dare to be Jewish for one more minute after that.

Lili came back to the present as the drumbeats grew louder, as boots clashed against stone in an all too familiar rhythm and the marchers marched into view.

They wore the same shirts; they carried the same flags and sang the same songs that had destroyed her life eight months earlier.

But the columns were wider now and there were louder cheers from the pedestrians who’d stopped to watch.

Who raised their arms as one in the National Socialists’ attention-grabbing salute.

They’re growing in number; they’re getting stronger. They’re not the flash in the pan Father swore they would be.

Lili took another step back and another as her body started to tremble.

Berlin was supposed to be a fresh start, a place where nobody knew about her or her Jewish upbringing.

Where she could be anyone she chose to be and couldn’t come to harm.

But what if she really had made a mistake?

What if the Party had an even stronger hold here than they’d carved out in Leipzig?

What if her newly drawn-up, and expensive, identification papers failed a more rigorous check than her landlady’s cursory glance?

Or if the SA really could sniff out Jews the way the vile Der Stürmer newspaper said its loyal members could?

She fought for a steadying breath as her head began spinning.

I’ve been a fool; I’ve been stupid. What if I can’t remake myself here? What if Herr Posner was right and nowhere is safe?

Suddenly the money she’d inherited from her father’s house and businesses felt like a danger, something that could mark her out and point jealous fingers her way.

Suddenly buying the shop – which at her age, and at a time when so many people were struggling to make ends meet would surely draw the wrong kind of attention – didn’t feel like a step towards certainty.

It felt like a very stupid thing to do. The pavement came rushing as her knees buckled.

‘Woah there, are you all right? This isn’t a good place to go fainting – you’ll get yourself trampled on.’

The man holding her elbow, holding her up, looking down at her in concern, had the kindest brown eyes and a warm smile Lili wanted to believe in.

‘It’s not them, is it, who’s frightened you?’

He nodded to the brownshirts who were now thundering past them.

‘Honestly, I know they look and sound awful, but they’re nothing to worry about. Berlin’s always full of protests about one thing or another. This lot are just the latest ones shouting the loudest. They can’t do you any harm.’

Lili’s heart sank again. It might as well have been Benjamin talking.

Her would-be rescuer was yet another man who couldn’t face facts.

Another man with too much trust in the world, who couldn’t see that hatred of the Jews wasn’t one thing or another to the National Socialists.

It was the flame which warmed their blood.

They can’t do you any harm, but they’d make a target out of me.

Everything about him, from his spotless black fedora to his highly polished brogues, signalled wealth and position. Lili stopped looking into his eyes. She didn’t need kind smiles or knights whose armour kept them aloof from the world. She needed to build a life no one could touch.

The streets were filling up again, night-time revellers starting to stream out of the station to replace the home-going workers. Nobody was looking at the brownshirts; nobody was looking at her. Don’t let the city swallow you up was the opposite of good advice.

‘Can I get you a taxi? Or could I walk you somewhere?’

He was still talking, still radiating concern. Lili didn’t answer him – she didn’t have time to waste.

There would be friends one day, and people she could rely on, but not yet. Not until she’d found a safe place. She drew a deep breath, looked up again and met his eyes. She didn’t let herself linger there.

‘I’m fine. It’s nothing. You’ve been very kind, but please don’t bother yourself about me anymore.’

The crowds were thickening again, laughing and shouting, surging across the street, waiting to swallow her. Lili shook herself free of his arm and his protests and plunged in.

!