Once We Were Brothers by Ronald H. Balson Page B

leave, to run from the lawless violence? Cardinal Kakowski said he would take the matter up with his superiors and see what he could do. Unfortunately, he also cautioned us that Rome is fearful of antagonizing Hitler. Things aren’t going too well for the Church in Germany. There have been persecutions of priests and nuns. Church property has been confiscated. Besides, Cardinal Kakowski doubts that the street thugs are church-going Catholics anyway, so he reasons that pastoral declarations will have little effect.’
    Ben opened his hands. “But in the end it didn’t matter. Nothing came of the visit. There was no pastoral declaration.”
    Catherine paused to refill her coffee and left the room to check her messages. When she returned, Ben was standing by the window, speaking aloud. He blushed, like a child caught with his hand in a cookie jar. “Oh, don’t mind me,” he said. “It’s just an old man’s eccentricity.”
    She nodded and resumed her place at the head of the table. “So, you got information about Germany from the radio broadcasts?”
    “Not just the radio. People who traveled to Germany would return with first hand information. My father had a cousin Zbigniew, we called him Ziggy, a big, thick man with a bushy gray beard. He was a salesman who called on customers in Berlin and Munich. From time to time, he would come to dinner and tell us bizarre stories about what was happening in Germany.
    “Like one night in October 1935, about two years after Otto came to live with us, Ziggy returned from a trip to Berlin with a frightening report. ‘The Nuremburg Laws on Citizenship and Race,’ he said, ‘that’s the latest – another crazy law passed by Hitler. He just revoked the citizenship of all German Jews, no matter who they are – war heroes, city officials, doctors – you name it. No longer are they even citizens of their own damn country. Only people of German or kindred blood can be subjects of the Reich.’ Ziggy punctuated his story with his fat finger. ‘The law specifically states, “A Jew cannot be a citizen of the Reich.” It says a person of Jewish blood can’t vote and he can’t hold public office.’
    “‘What’s Jewish blood?’ my mother asked. ‘As far as I know, we all have the same chemistry.’
    “‘That’s a good question. The Germans look at your grandparents. If three out of four of them were members of the Jewish religious community, you got Jewish blood. If two out of four, then you got mixed Jewish blood. There’s all kinds of goofy rules. A non-Jew, who has never been inside a synagogue in his whole life, has Jewish blood if one of his parents was Jewish and he was born after the Law on Protection of German Blood and Honor.’ Ziggy took a sip of wine and laughed. ‘I guess Jewish blood flows through your veins with a Yiddish accent.’
    “My parents shook their heads. It all seemed morbidly unreal. Otto, Beka and I sat there at the dinner table looking at each other like we were hearing fantastic ghost stories. To us it was all fiction. It was happening in Germany and that was worlds away from Zamość. It might as well have been happening on the moon.
    “‘From now on,’ Ziggy said, ‘anybody’s right to be a citizen of Germany depends on a grant of Reich citizenship papers. Papers are the big thing. Everybody’s got to have them. And of course, no Jews are allowed to have papers.’
    “Then Ziggy went on to tell us about the rise of the SS, the secret police. ‘Himmler recruits his SS out of the German youth program, mostly from middle and upper class families,’ he said. ‘They dress all in black – black tunic, black pantaloons tucked into black boots, black helmets. They’re called the Schutzstaffel, the guard echelon of the National Socialist party.’ Ziggy shivered and his shoulders shook. ‘They’re terrifying, I tell you. Everyone’s scared to death of them, all the way down to the average German workingman. Scares the hell out of me