Short Story: If This Be Treason...

Short Story: If This Be Treason...

It was a beautiful sunny day in the summer of 1934 in the old town of Halle on the river Saale in Germany where Louise Gold had been born and where she had lived all of her 19 years. It was the second year of Nazi rule, but since the young woman was not interested in politics, this did not bother her much.

She enjoyed her walk to work because the sun was shining, and she was looking forward to another day of work. She had been very happy since she had started this job at the ABC Charitable Organization, her first after finishing business school, about two months earlier. Although it did not pay very much, she liked her work and her colleagues who treated her fairly although she was very much the junior clerk in an office of six. Best of all, she was employed which was something of a miracle in those times when so many people were out of work. She remembered with pleasure that her boss, Mr. Martin, had praised her a few days before, intimating that she might get a raise in the near future. Since both her brothers and her father were out of work, the extra money would come in very handy.

As she entered the building where her company was located, she was surprised to see a soldier standing at the outer door.

“And where are you going?” he asked her aggressively.

Louise was somewhat surprised. She was an extremely pretty girl, well-proportioned, dark-haired and dark-eyed, and young men normally talked to her in a different tone of voice.

“To work,” she answered. “I work for ABC.”

“Ah, finally somebody’s turned up. Follow me, Miss. What is your name?”

“I’m Louise Gold. What is wrong?”

Hearing her name, the soldier smiled grimly to himself. ‘No wonder, one of them,’ he thought, but he did not say anything. Without answering her question, he accompanied her to the offices of the ABC Organization. As he opened the door for her, the girl stopped so quickly that her escort bumped into her. Mr. Martin and his secretary who were normally in the office at that hour had obviously not arrived yet, but the big room and her boss’s adjacent private office were full of men in uniform who were pulling out file and desk drawers and looking in closets, behind cabinets and under desks.

As she saw one of them rifle her own desk, Louise ran to him and yelled, “What are you doing to my desk?” But before he could answer, she noticed that all drawers except one were totally empty. The middle drawer alone contained a few personal things, a handkerchief, a fountain pen, a few pencils and paper clips. Everything else was gone. There were no letterheads, no file folders, no letters to be answered, no address book. Even her shorthand notebook was missing.

“What is going on here? What have you done with my things?” she asked the soldier. “And where are Mr. Martin and Miss Fernau? They are always here before me!”

“Actually, that’s what we want to hear from you, young lady.” A tall handsome young officer had come into the room and placed himself squarely in front of Louise. “Where are your colleagues and where are the files?”

Without answering, she walked to the file cabinets and saw that all the drawers were empty, also the drawers in all the desks. She shrugged her shoulders, “I have no idea. When I left last night, everything was still here, and so were all the people.” She pointed to the open door in one corner of the room. “Mr. Martin and his secretary, Miss Fernau, were in his office, Mr. Bernhard was dictating to Miss Braun at his desk by that window over there, and Mr. Gruner was working at his desk, the one in the corner.”

“Did you leave early?”

“Just a little. It was about 545, and I normally work until six or a little later. I had finished typing a list for Mr. Gruner, and when I wanted to start on the letters Mr. Bernhard had dictated earlier, he said I could do them in the morning. And when I asked Miss Fernau if she had anything for me to do, she said that I had been working hard and just for once could go home a little early. They all still had work to do, she said, but there was nothing that I could do at that time. I asked her if she was sure about that, and she said, ‘yes, very sure.’ And so I left and said, ‘See you in the morning.’ And they all murmured in reply and went on working. That’s all I know.”

“So you are trying to tell me that when you left here, all the files were still here, and you had no suspicion that your colleagues planned to leave and take the files with them? You thought everything was normal and no different from any other day?”

“Well, it was a little unusual that they let me go early. Most of the time I had to stay a few minutes late each evening because there was always something to put away or to get ready for the mail.”

“Did you mail anything last night?”

“No, I didn’t. I didn’t think about it at the time, but actually that was unusual, too. I even asked about the mail, but to my surprise Miss Fernau said she would take care of it herself. Come to think about it, that has not happened during all the time I worked here. I always took the letters to the post office; that was one of my duties,” Louise added.

“Oh, come on now, Miss . . . what was your name? . . . It just doesn’t make sense that you know nothing about their plans.”

The girl shook her head, “I’m sorry, I had no idea. As I told you, except for letting me go home early and not giving me anything to mail, everything was just as usual. And the name is Gold, Louise Gold.”

At the mention of her name, there was a similar smirk on the officer’s face as there had been on the soldier’s before.

“Were any of the other people in the office Jewish?” he asked.

Louise looked at him. “Jewish? None of us are Jewish as far as I know!”

“Come on, you are Jewish, aren’t you? With a name like Gold you must be.”

“Not that it makes any difference to me, but I’m not, and I can prove it. I became interested in genealogy several years ago, and the oldest Gold in my family tree actually was a goldsmith at the time last names were made up, and my father and I figured that’s how he got the name. And he was not Jewish!”

“You started checking into your ancestry several years ago? When was that exactly?”

“I don’t know if I can tell you exactly, but wait, I was sixteen at the time, so it must have been some time in 1931.”

“In 1931? Why were you interested then in proving that you were not Jewish? After all, that only became important last year!” he asked with raised eyebrows.

“Being Jewish or not had nothing to do with it. I never even thought about that. A friend of mine and I decided to establish our family trees, to find out where our forbears came from. I started with the information in our family bible, and then I began writing to different church offices in order to find out more. It had absolutely nothing to do with being Jewish or not.”

The officer did not look convinced but he decided to leave this subject for the moment. He made a motion to one of the soldiers to join him.

“It doesn’t look as if we’re getting anything out of her right here and now,” he said. “Take her to headquarters. Maybe a few hours in detention will refresh her memory.”

At those words the soldier gripped her arm hard and took her out of the room, out of the building, and into a waiting car. At first the young woman tried to resist but a look at her captor’s face showed her that it would be useless, and his hold on her arm became more painful when she struggled. So she let him push her into the car and wondered what was going to happen to her.

At Headquarters she was put in a room with barred windows, and nobody came near her the rest of the day. She was not given any food or drink which did not bother her much because she would have been much too upset to eat, but when the evening came around she called out, not knowing if anybody would hear her or not. The same officer who had talked to her before came in and said sarcastically, “I assume you are now ready to tell us the truth.”

“I have been telling you the truth all along, I know absolutely nothing more about the organization than what I have told you already. But my father and brothers will be worried about me when I don’t get home at the usual time. Have you told them where I am?”

“You can go home and tell them yourself as soon as you tell us what you and the others did with the files and where your colleagues are hiding.”

“But I told you and keep telling you, I do not know anything. I have worked with them for only eight weeks, and although they treated me politely, I was not intimate with any of them. I know nothing about them but their names, I do not even know where they live.”

“We know where they live all right but that’s not where they are now. We need to know where they are hiding and what they did with the files.”

“I do not know. I keep telling you, I have no idea,” Louise said, and in frustration involuntary tears welled up in her eyes. “What is so important about the files anyway? We are just a charitable organization, we have nothing to hide.”

“Just a charitable organization? Sure! One of the most dangerous organizations working against the state. Do you know the penalty for treason?”

Louise turned pale. “Treason? Did you say treason? But how could that be?”

“Yes, that is what we are asking ourselves. It is a shame that we did not discover this nest of traitors earlier, but we will find them, trust me, we will find them all, and then you will all be hanged!”

With these words the officer left Louise to her frightening thoughts and locked the door behind him. Trying to persuade herself that his last words were just an empty threat, the girl tried to remember. She had never had any suspicion that ABC was not what it seemed to be, but now she assumed that it was possible that the victims whom the organization had helped were people who were hunted by the Nazis either for their race or religion or because they had protested against the state. The description of the damages such as flood, fire, theft, could have been code words for other things. But that possibility would never have occurred to her before.

On thinking back, she remembered that although her colleagues were nice to her, she had sometimes felt she did not quite belong to the group. She had blamed it on the discrepancy in their ages and that she had been there only such a short time, but now she recalled how often all five of them had sat down together behind the closed doors of Mr. Martin’s office while she stayed in the big room and filed, typed and answered the telephone. And she remembered noticing once that the door to Mr. Martin’s office fitted so well that not a sound of what was going on inside escaped to the outside. She had thought at the time that her boss wanted to shut out the typewriter noise from the big room.

After a few more hours she was taken to a regular jail cell. When she asked again if her father had been notified, she did not receive an answer, and she lay down on the hard narrow bed in despair. What would her father and brothers think? Her father had already had a run-in with a civil servant and had been saved only because the man had an unexpected sense of humor. Coming into an office in City Hall in order to pick up a special form which he needed, Franz Gold had called out a cheerful “Good morning.” The man behind the counter reacted belligerently. “Don’t you know that the German greeting now is ‘Heil Hitler?’” The old man smiled and answered, “Well, my good man, when an old bird has called ‘cuckoo’ for 60 years, you cannot teach him to suddenly call ‘Heil Hitler’ in his 61st year.” For a moment the man behind the desk went tense, then, as if he could not help himself, he started laughing and waved him away. When Mr. Gold told his sons about this, they wondered at his audacity and asked him to be a little more careful in the future. They told him that in this day and age it did not pay to treat politics humorously. Her father called them alarmist at the time, and his daughter had agreed with him, but since then they had read of several instances where people were jailed for making fun of similar silly rules, and he had become a little more careful with his colorful sayings.

Now she had to worry about him. If he had no idea why she had not come home, he might go to the organization’s office and find out that she had been jailed. And in defending her, he might say something that would really hurt him in the eyes of the Nazis.

Finally Louise fell asleep from sheer exhaustion, but at daybreak she was awakened rudely and again sent to the interrogation room. This time two people hammered at her, a soldier and the same officer who had talked to her before. They kept telling her what she was supposed to have done, but she remained adamant. She did not know anything. She had no idea where her colleagues were. She did not know what had happened to the files. She had not known that the business of the organization had been directed against the state. She recalled a few names of charity recipients, but no addresses. When she mentioned the names, they pointed out to her that all were very common German names, Mueller, Schmidt, Meier, Schulz, and so on, a fact that had not occurred to her before. And for the first time she thought that they might have been cover names and that there might be some truth in the soldiers’ insinuations.

At the first lull in the interrogation she asked about her father. “Have you notified my father where I am? He is over sixty and not in the best of health, and he will worry about me.”

The officer countered with another question. “Did he know that this organization was an enemy of the people?”

“How could he? I did not know it although I worked for them. He was just happy that I finally had a job, especially since he and my brothers have been out of work for a while, but he did not ask me what it was all about. And even if he had, I could not have told him anything. I told you over and over again, I was convinced that this was a regular charitable organization which helped people in trouble.”

“It sure did, it helped people in trouble with the state.”

“But I did not know that, I thought it was the usual trouble, fire, flood, illness, and so on. That’s all I ever saw in the files.”

“Can you recall any more names or other facts from the files?”

Louise shook her head in despair. “I have told you everything I know. Please believe me.” And as though she could not help herself, she started crying.

“Crocodile tears will not help you, young woman,” the officer said harshly, but he seemed uncomfortable nevertheless. “We want the truth and nothing but the truth.”

“But I have told you the truth, over and over again. Why don’t you believe me?”

The door opened, and the soldier was called outside. All of a sudden, the officer seemed more sympathetic. “Please, miss, please stop crying and think about it. You are not helping anybody by keeping quiet. We will catch your colleagues, and then it is all over. But if you help us catch them, we will go easier on you.”

The girl tried very hard to suppress her sobbing but her voice still sounded tearful as she said, “I don’t know where they are. I don’t even have any idea where they live. They never talked about their private lives.”

“Didn’t you find that strange?”

“Not really, I thought it was because they were older. Maybe when you are in an office with other young people, you automatically talk more. You might complain about your parents or talk about dances you go to or men you meet or anything you might do on Sundays. But we never talked about our time off or about our families; they did not tell me about theirs and they did not ask about mine. I don’t even know if the men are married or have any children. Actually, I know absolutely nothing about any of them. I just assumed that they discouraged private talks because they would have interfered with work.”

“I still find that hard to believe,” the man said but did not sound as sure of himself.

Louise just shrugged her shoulders but did not cry again. She made up her mind not to show any weakness which would only be interpreted as feminine wiles. Inside she was almost sick with worry about her father and her brothers. Maybe they had been arrested, too. One heard about these things happening, of whole families being jailed, but she certainly had never thought it would happen to her or anyone in her family.

She did not know that her father, worried when she had not come home the night before, had gone to her place of work in the morning but had been told that his daughter had disappeared together with her co-workers.

“But she wouldn’t have gone without telling me,” the old man said in confusion. “She left for work yesterday morning, just as she always did. She even told me what she was going to cook for supper when she got home. She could not have planned to go away. Are you sure about that?”

The officer nodded. “You can see, the office is empty, and all of the employees are gone. Don’t you know where they could be?”

Louise’s father shook his head. “I didn’t think Louise was that well acquainted with her colleagues. And I’m sure that if anything like that was planned, she would have told her brothers and me about it. She would not have just disappeared without letting us know.”

But the officer did not believe the man. He was hoping that if the father was persuaded that his daughter was in hiding, he would lead them to the secret hideaway. Therefore he did not arrest the old man but had him and his house watched. But to his chagrin, nothing happened. The watchers could see that the light in the kitchen burned all night, but the old man did not contact anybody else, nobody came to the house, and neither he nor his sons left the house again.

It was a big disappointment for the officer but he did not give up hope. He gave them one more night for some kind of communication to be either sent out or received or for any incriminating actions under cover of darkness. But again nothing happened.

Putting all his information about the young woman together in his mind, he became almost sure that she was telling the truth. He knew, however, that this would not make any difference to her fate in the long run. She would be interrogated over and over again, and no matter what she said, she would be judged and sentenced according to her captors’ preconceived ideas. He recalled her warm brown eyes, which looked as if she could not tell a lie, how they had glittered with tears when she realized they did not believe her. And she was so young and so pretty. What a shame to condemn her to a life in jail at best, with torture and execution as possible alternatives. And all that because she had become involved with the wrong people in her job.

He fought a difficult battle with himself, knowing that his decision would influence not only his career but his whole future.

*****

A few days later Louise Gold was released from prison without an explanation, but she was sure that it was the young officer who had ordered it. For a long time she was afraid that she might be picked up again. When nothing happened, she concluded that her file must have been eradicated. In spite of her fear, she made discreet inquiries as to the whereabouts of her former co-workers, but they had disappeared completely. A long time later an acquaintance told her that he had heard that her boss, Mr. Martin, was in a concentration camp.

Since she did not know the name of the young officer who had been instrumental in having her released, she never knew what happened to him but often wondered if he had suffered for his kindness to her. But finally she decided to put the whole thing out of her mind and go on with her life, and she persuaded her father and brothers that it would be best if they acted as if the incident had never happened.