“It starts with their wedding.”
As Gerlinde gently turned the rustling, transparent paper that preceded each new page, Tadek expected to see the blackness of the uniforms, the arch of the daggers, the familiar faces which were now all answering for their crimes before the world; instead, there was an old, Gothic cathedral, a young, smiling couple in front of it, top hats, laughing girls with short hair and bright lips, and some dignified gentleman with a walrus mustache who was caught in the process of popping open the bottle of champagne. The bride and the groom weren’t looking at the camera but at each other instead.
“They had a different, official wedding portrait,” Gerlinde whispered, as though not to disturb the past, “but Vati insisted to put this one first. They’re very happy here. See? It’s not staged, it’s natural and they don’t look as stiff and somber as in the official one, taken in the studio… See?”
He did see. He didn’t want to but he did.
“It was taken in 1922, right before the hyper-inflation hit Germany full force. They loved each other very much back then.”
“They weren’t in the Party,” Tadek remarked incredulously. Far from it; they looked like typical Bohemian Berliners, if anything.
“No, they weren’t. Not yet, at any rate. Mutti came to Berlin from a very small Bavarian town to be in the pictures. Needless to say, she wasn’t the only one with such an idea and before she knew it, she was working as a cigarette girl in some dingy dive or the other.” She chuckled and shook her head. “Incredible, isn’t it? The high and mighty Mathilde Neumann, a cigarette girl.”
Tadek felt a grin growing on his face as well. “What of your father?”
“What of him? He was not much better off. He also came to Berlin in search of a good life but without any connections, his education as an economist didn’t mean squat. The banks were going bankrupt almost every week, therefore hiring new workers was the furthest thing from their agenda. So, he was doing odd jobs for whoever would hire him. He worked as a busboy in hotels and as a waiter and as a taxi driver. In the evenings, he played the piano in different dives. In one of them, he met my mother. They got married quickly and soon, she was pregnant with Georg.” Gerlinde paused, regarding the photos tenderly. “I think they were the happiest the most, those days. Money was tight but they had each other and that was all that mattered.”
“What happened?” Tadek repeated, boring his gaze into the black-and-white couple in front of him. What happened to this seemingly happy family that turned them into such cold-blooded Nazis? That was the question that burned the tip of his tongue and yet, he held it in for now.
“What happened was that the hyper-inflation turned their meager income into a virtually nonexistent one. Mutti couldn’t work anymore, as no one wants a big-bellied cigarette girl in their cabaret. And whatever Vati was making wasn’t enough by any means. They had to leave their apartment and rent a room in East Berlin – worker’s paradise, as it was mockingly dubbed. It was no better than living in the slums. When Georg was born, it was worse still. She didn’t have enough milk for him and they both were half-starved, Vati and her… And then her neighbor, some good-meaning woman, also from Bavaria, began bringing her milk and along with it, papers from their hometown. Nationalistic ones. It was from them that Mutti ‘learned’ that it was all the Jews’ fault that her newborn was starving and that the German people ought to take their country back and that communists are all violent atheistic criminals who are a cancer on the German society and need to be obliterated…”
Her hand lay limp next to the photo in which Otto Neumann held not one, but two babies.
“By the time Götz was born, she was worshiping der Führer. She grew so obsessed with him, she traveled to Munich with her two small children to have his new book signed by him and made friends with some people… Vati was making good money by then, as Margot discovered him in one of the dives where he played the piano and offered him to take up the position as a pianist in a very upscale restaurant. She used to sing there but when she met Vati, she was already involved in the motion pictures, so they didn’t really stay in contact, of which he was very grateful later in life.”
“How did he come to be in the SS, if he was a simple pianist?”
“My guess is that my mother talked him into it. I don’t think he was ever a convinced nationalist himself. An opportunist, if anything. Those people she met in Munich, they told her about the new elite regiment forming there. Its leaders were in desperate need of educated, young men, of Aryan origin. Vati fitted the bill. They offered him an elegant new uniform, a very good position in the administration sector, and decent money. If I’m entirely honest, I think he agreed to move there just to placate my mother. Mathilde Neumann was an ambitious woman, you see, but when she realized that her dreams of becoming an actress would never come true, not with two children on her hands at any rate, she most likely began nagging him that she was bored at home and that no one in Berlin had an ounce of respect for the Mother and didn’t count one for anything. And in Munich, she had der Führer and all of his followers putting Aryan mothers on a pedestal and praising them something ridiculous for doing what a cat in the alley can do and a few times a
