Pennies For Hitler Read Online Free

towards them on its tracks. Mutti didn’t seem to notice the wind that whipped her skirts as she glanced back towards the University. Her face was as blank as its stone.
    Papa would come soon, Georg told himself. He had to come soon.
    The tram stopped in front of them with a creak and a clang. Mutti hauled him up the steps, onto a hard wooden seat. She didn’t let go of Georg’s hand even on the tram, though he wasn’t a little boy now whose hand had to be held in case he fell off. But Georg didn’t pull it away.
    Mutti didn’t speak to the conductor either, just handed him money for their tickets. She gazed out as though looking at something Georg couldn’t see.
    They got out at the stop before Tante Gudrun’s house.
    The wind pushed at Mutti’s skirts again. It smelled of flowers, of summer to come. Georg wished the wind would go away. If the wind stopped there might be peace, like in Papa’s poem. He would hear Papa’s voice: ‘ Quiet touches the treetops … ’

    Mutti still didn’t speak as she hurried him across the road and down the footpath, through Tante Gudrun’s neat white-painted gate, along the path between the yellow daffodils. Mutti pulled the door bell over and over, as though the noise could make up for the words she couldn’t speak.
    At last Tante opened the door; she was wearing her navy-blue silk dress. Tante’s house always smelled of turnips, which was strange, because Georg had never eaten turnips there. Perhaps the servant ate them in the kitchen.
    Tante stared at Mutti’s face, her messy hair. Mutti’s face looked set in stone, like someone had decided to make a gargoyle pretty. ‘Marlene? What is it?’
    Mutti shoved past Tante, into the hall with its soft flowered carpet. She opened the door of Tante’s living room. ‘Stay in here,’ she said to Georg in English. ‘Promise? Don’t move.’
    Georg was so relieved that she could speak he nodded, even though he wanted to yell at her, to ask about Papa, about the Jews. To ask, ‘What’s happening? When can we see Papa?’
    Instead he waited. He sat on the brocade sofa and looked at the flowered carpet. He thought of Papa, of blood and gargoyles. He thought of the bodies on the grass, then forced the thought away. He tried to make his mind empty, to stop the pain. He tried to find a story, any story. The stories were all gone. Even the rest of the words of Papa’s last poem seemed frozen somewhere he couldn’t reach.
    Now and then he heard voices from the kitchen. At last he moved closer to the door, to listen.
    ‘Please, Gudrun,’ Mutti kept pleading. There was a mumble and then, ‘Please help us.’
    Perhaps Mutti wanted Tante Gudrun to ask Onkel Klaus to take his motor to the University to fetch Papa. Papa wouldn’tknow that they were here. He’d worry. Mutti should telephone Lotte so that she could tell Papa where they were when he came home again …
    He remembered the students’ laughter as the young man screamed. Pictures of the bodies seeped into his mind again. He tried to push them out but they seeped back. Bodies and blood, black student robes, red blood, white faces on green grass. The young men’s faces and —
    He thrust his fist into his mouth to stop from crying out. Papa’s face all bloody on one side, the other side the skin all white, the eye staring towards them as though it couldn’t see, would never see again.
    It couldn’t be Papa. It was someone else! It had to be! But if it were … then Onkel Klaus could take Papa to the hospital. The doktors would make him better. They’d bandage up his head so you couldn’t see the red, just like they’d bandaged up Georg’s foot when he had cut it at the lake.
    ‘Your foot has gone white!’ Papa had joked. ‘Poor Georg, one pink foot and one white.’ They’d laugh at Papa’s white head and Lotte would bring in stewed pears with cream …
    The students must know it was all a mistake now. Papa was not a Jew. He was their teacher. A teacher should