Read Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black for Free Online Page B

Denmark. Unlike his intelligently foresighted young brother, he was one of those who wanted to be nearby because the Hitler episode surely couldn’t last. She concealed from the son who had managed to bring her safely to a country far enough distant, that she was also going back to Berlin. She couldn’t abandon either, the wonderful old family retainers—not Jews, fortunately for them—the faithful gardener-handyman inherited from her own father, the peasant womanwho had been wet-nurse and nanny to the children and stayed on in some undefined capacity in what was her only life. And of course, friends in the old cultured set who, like the humble kind of retainers were securely not Jews—and would never be Nazis? She was apparently blithely unaware that she might compromise them by claiming long friendship; her family had been assimilated for generations. They enjoyed pork like any good German and didn’t circumcise their sons.
    When her letters started to come post-marked Germany her son demanded she leave at once. She lingered with cajoling, reassuring excuses—just another week, what’s the difference. At last she took ship in Holland, emigrating a second time from the same Rotterdam on the same line. Three days at sea: the news that war was declared between Britain and Germany. What was to be the Second World War had begun. When the ship reached Senegal on the West Coast of Africa, it was impounded at the port of Dakar. Senegal was a French colony and France, by then, had entered the war as Britain’s ally. The truant mother still held a German passport and along with others who did, she was taken under guard from the ship to detention at a camp in the ruin of a leper asylum outside the city. Her son expected her to arrive at a port in their adopted country on a scheduled date. Holland had not declared war, there was no reason that a ship of the Holland Afrika Line would be hampered on its route. He arranged for a friend to meet his mother when she disembarked and see her onto a train bound for home upcountry, where he was awaiting her. Instead there came an incoherent frantic call from the friend. The ship had docked, passengers emerged, but Grete did not. There were relatives and friends ready to greet returning travellers who also waited in bewilderment as these didnot come waving happily down the gangplank. Everyone sought an explanation from somebody, anybody. Out of the clamour at last the Captain appeared and as if still stunned by fear told that he could do nothing when the French authorities boarded his ship and demanded to take German passport holders into custody. He did not know where they were held.
    There began for the son what must have been a nightmare both surreal and desperately practical. He has somewhere stowed—what does one do this for?—in the cache of
his
documented life, the letters, the official rejections, the notes of imploring visits to consulates and government departments in strategy to get her released.
    If she were still alive.
    How could bureaucratic processes—only ones available, badgering the Red Cross, importuning the aghast Swedes who hastily had been made the representatives of people detained in makeshift camps God knows how where by the chaos of war—reach the void, silence; worse, a gust of images tossing up thirst, hunger, parched desert, tropical deluge.
    After three weeks there was a letter. The headed address: Camp de Concentration de Sébikholane. Alive: her flowing hand on a dirty piece of paper. Her English. Many exclamation marks following the announcement that because she speaks French she has been able to persuade a guard to mail the letter. She has had fever but it’s quite okay now. The other people with her are wonderful. There’s a circus troupe and she’s great pals with them; the trapeze girl has a bed next to hers in the tent where everyone sleeps, and so her boy-friend, also from the high wire, comes