A soft smile passed over Otto’s face.
“You hate me, don’t you?” Gerlinde asked, only half in jest.
He shook his head and cupped her cheek with infinite tenderness. “Not at all. In fact, I’m proud of you.”
“You raised me well,” she grinned. “Despite all.”
“You shall remember good things about me then? After they…”
“Yes.” She took his hand and pressed it. “Only good things. I swear.”
Epilogue
Berlin. Invalidenfriedhof, 1952
Afternoon. The air thick with blossom and serenity. Around the Invalids’ Cemetery, the silence lay, only a lonely bird disturbed the peace. Tadek stood before the cross with a hat in his hands. In front of it, Gerlinde was fixing the fresh flowers. The old ones had already made their way into Erich’s paper bag, brought especially for that purpose.
Otto Neumann.
Mathilde Neumann.
Tadek thought it to be nice for them to decide to exhume Frau Neumann’s body and rebury it along with her husband. However, according to Gerlinde, there was a practical and not very sentimental decision behind it. Two years ago, not long after their marriage, Gerlinde and Erich decided to sell the house, buy a small apartment and donate the rest of the money to the World Jewish Congress, of which Tadek was now a proud member. His law degree, along with his new passport, came from across the pond but old Europe still refused to let him go. Despite being founded before the war, the German branch of the Congress now consisted, in a large part, of survivors like him. Tadek had finally found his family and a reason to live once again.
“Well, Doctor Wirths.” Gerlinde turned to her husband with a smile.
“Yes, Doctor Wirths?” he replied, his eyes wrinkling with the same mischief.
“Thank you for coming with me.” She got up, brushed the invisible dust off her trousers’ knees and reached for Tadek’s hand. “You too, Doctor Baumann.”
The title was still new and still made him blush copiously. “It was my pleasure. I like cemeteries.”
“Me too. They’re very peaceful. Quiet.”
For a few moments, all three fell silent again as they observed the cross. There were no records of Neumann’s rank or service on it, just the name on a small plaque – Gerlinde’s decision.
“Afraid someone may break it?” Tadek had asked her when she’d just ordered the cross.
“No. Afraid someone will make it into a shrine instead. They shouldn’t have given us the body. They should have cremated it like they did with the others and dumped the ashes somewhere. They only did it out of a sense of decency, because he’d had the decency to give himself up. At least, that’s what Morris has said. I could have had him cremated myself, of course, but I knew I wouldn’t have had the heart to throw away the ashes.”
He felt chills down his spine when she said it back then and still felt them now as he looked at it. The most blood-shedding war’s shadow still loomed over Europe and the new wars were already raging – in Palestine, in Korea. People had cried, “never again,” and began slaughtering each other anew the very next day, just to cry, “never again,” the following evening. Hate went nowhere. It was still here, omnipotent and waiting to spread its poisonous roots into everything fertile.
The wind ruffled Gerlinde’s hair. She moved it away from her eyes that were fixed on the grave.
“Do you know what still bothers me the most? The fact that he could have still been alive.”
Erich turned to her but she waved him off quickly. “No, not that I reported him to Morris and then went and talked him into surrendering. That was something that ought to have been done and I don’t regret it in the slightest. I’m talking about him choosing his own fate when he decided to don that uniform. He was a Berliner, not by birth but by heart. He loved life. He played some nifty jazz – when no one could hear. He wasn’t a sadist and he wasn’t a killer. The thing is, he claimed that he did it all for us, for the family. I believe that it was indeed his reason. But you know, I’d rather we all lived in poverty; I’d rather we all struggled instead of conforming to all that hate, to all that vile, disgusting new order all around us. I’d rather we upped and left for some other country. Or stay and be outcasts but still untainted on the inside, you understand? I’d rather he’d not made that choice. I’d rather him remain my father instead of becoming Gruppenführer Neumann. I would have given everything to still have him near. But he made that choice for himself and here we are,” she ended bitterly.
Tadek wondered how many other young people thought the same way. There would always be people like Neumann, who would always make the wrong choices and aid the dictators and commit crimes “out of love.” Love for their country, love for their family, completely and entirely ignoring the other people who may love their country and their family just as much and who would have to suffer just because one family is more important than the other – because of religion, skin color, geographical position, political affiliations – one can only guess. But while there were people like Gerlinde, who would reject even her own blood in the name of something much more profound – universal justice and love of everyone living, indiscriminately – there was still hope for this world.
Tadek smiled and pressed her fingers tighter. His sister, not by blood but by conviction. Her palm was warm in his hand and everything was as it ought to have been. It took him seven eternally long years, but he was finally at peace. Liberated.
Note to the Reader:
Thank you so much for reading “The Aftermath” – I hope you enjoyed the story! Even though it is fictional, all historical events mentioned in it are
