Again, Gerlinde waited for Tadek to say something and again, he didn’t.
“When I was little and we were boarding the train to go see Oma and Opa,” Erich continued his cheerful banter, “I slipped from my mother’s hand and fell through between the edge of the platform and the train. They got me out of there, of course, but I was so terrified that the train would start moving and would cut me in half. I’ve had a fear of trains ever since.”
Gerlinde held her breath. Now Tadek would say something. She looked at him but he had a wistful smile on his face, his gaze lost somewhere in the ruins. “I love trains. Always did. We traveled a lot when I was still a child and I always looked forward to those trips. I shared the bunk on top with my brother and he would tell me stories long into the night, scary ones. He thought to frighten me – he would seize my sides under the blankets whenever a witch appeared and grabbed a child or a giant would catch his prey – but I only laughed and I had such a stupid laugh, it would make him laugh too…”
Gerlinde thought about the train they took to Nuremberg. They had an entire compartment to themselves and a table reserved for their family in the dining car. Her brothers constantly fought over something but Vati was too busy with reading countless reports to discipline them. Her mother would try to settle them down but they simply didn’t acknowledge her authority and she would take out her frustration on little Gerlinde instead and yank her hair painfully with the silver brush. Gerlinde winced and tolerated the pulling and the stinging pain in her scalp but wormed her way out of her mother’s arms as soon as she could and dashed for her Vati’s lap instead and he’d kiss the top of her head absentmindedly and make the pain go away at once.
“What about you?” Erich gave her a prod with his elbow in a playful attempt to bring her out of her reverie. “You must have traveled quite a lot by train.”
And by plane, too and by car, always with the driver, but Gerlinde kept it all to herself, not to make it even worse between her and Tadek.
“What’s your favorite memory?” Erich pressed, oblivious to her desire to keep her past thoroughly buried.
Who was she trying to deceive though? She had no right to keep any such past resting peacefully in her memories only. It was everyone’s past now. It belonged to the world so that they could dissect it in pieces and demonstrate each part of it to the public and declare gravely that this was what led to the genocide, that this was the type of a person who commits it, that these were the signs that they should have noticed, and these were the crimes they ought to hang them all for…
She was forever branded, an arch-criminal’s daughter and no matter what she did, no matter who she became later in life, her family name would forever be stained with blood.
But was it really fair for her to carry such a burden? She did nothing wrong, nothing whatsoever, she wanted to scream into the night until her voice would grow hoarse. She was a mere teenager and a nurse at the most; she treated the injured Ivans along with her own compatriots and she never hurt anyone…
And yet, for some inexplicable reason, the heat of shame colored her cheeks with red at the mere thought that she was considering what was fair and what was not when she walked next to Tadek, whose entire family was annihilated and it was her own father who was complicit in it.
Gruppenführer Neumann. Vati.
“They aren’t the same people.” Gerlinde’s head was pounding. A desperate need to explain pulsed under her skin, asked to be cut open, like a vein with a razor. Through the film of tears, everything suddenly appeared double – the streetlamps, the road splitting in two, the buildings falling apart, crumbling like she was now. “He’s not the same man. Do you understand? Vati and Gruppenführer Neumann, it’s not the same man, just like Reichsmarschall that I knew and Hermann Göring on the screen is not the same man. Gruppenführer Neumann is guilty of those crimes, not Vati. Vati was a good man. He loved animals and played the piano for his guests. Gruppenführer Neumann wore the uniform and kept people in camps. Vati played chess with me and let me win almost every time just to make me happy. Gruppenführer Neumann didn’t care one way or another if little girls like me died in their hundreds just because their blood was the wrong type. How can they be the same man? They’re so entirely different!” Her whisper died in the night, stifled with tears that threatened to suffocate, yet never spilled from her eyes, full of anguish.
“I’m sure your father was a good father,” Erich said quietly. “It’s just, he wasn’t a good person. But I’m also sure, quite a few mothers, who’d lost their sons to my bullets, think me not to be a good person either.”
“That’s different.”
“I actually killed men. Your father only signed the papers.”
“You did it honestly.”
“Is there an honest way to take someone’s life?”
Gerlinde didn’t see his face but knew that he was smiling.
“I don’t know what to think anymore,” she said at last and wiped her eyes with the heels of her palms.
It felt good to finally admit it.
14
“Tadeusz?”
Tadek turned around. They were back at the Neumann’s estate. He wished desperately to be left alone, to process all he had seen on the screen and sort his own feelings out but she had called his name and now there was no escaping from this conversation, which would only set him against her. He knew what was coming. More justifications of what her father had done,
