A View Across the Rooftops

by Suzanne Kelman

After picking up his evening groceries, he turned into Staalstraat, where a commotion of angry, volatile voices confronted him. A young couple were having an altercation with a German officer. People everywhere stopped, watching from a safe distance. Helpless despair hung in the air as thick as the blanket of cold around them. Held noted people’s faces—the shock and the horror, but also the fear, as if any of them could be next.

What if his complete inability to care for her had let her down? Was it his fault there was such a huge hole inside her that she could only fill it with the evil that now waited for them around every corner? Was this how it started, the disillusionment of one’s soul, an easy target for evil that came disguised as elitist acceptance?

What was so threatening to the Third Reich about someone wanting to understand the fundamentals of calculus? What terrible threat could a young person educated in adding and subtracting be to the world?

After the initial shock of Occupation nearly a year before, there had been a cowering; a nation victimized, a collective holding of their breath, their only hope a stoic wait-and-see attitude. But the daily erosion of their way of life had been constant, like drops of acid rain, each small but adding up to something deadly. For him, the changes had been minor enough that he had learned to sidestep each new reality, readjust, then find his new set point. But now, as he passed each corrupted building and each familiar, yet barely recognizable street, he realized how the German occupiers had devoured the city.

Three years of the Nazi regime had made life harder, and the people wearier as a sad acceptance crept in. An unspoken, collective need to preserve their energy for the long haul as the war dragged on with no end in sight. Josef sighed. He could barely remember what peacetime felt like.

The British had adopted a saying that he had read about in the Underground newspapers: “Careless talk costs lives.” He knew, with a pained bitterness, precisely what that meant.

The slightest thing, the tiniest hint of which side you were on, which side you supported—the Fatherland or the Resistance—was taken very seriously now. The week before, an elderly professor had been marched away for having “suspicious” books in his personal library. Innocent books that encouraged young minds toward free thought. Everything that didn’t fit within Hitler’s narrow idea of what was acceptable was now seen as the work of the enemy.

She always felt there was something about him she couldn’t trust with her heart. It felt to her that he wanted her like he wanted one of his art pieces—something to put in his apartment to look shiny and beautiful. Or that he wanted her because she had told him he couldn’t have her. He never seemed to be sincere. In some way, she didn’t blame him. It was the world that he’d grown up in. He wasn’t a bad person, but there was definitely something wanting.

The Nazis at the university had become hyper-vigilant. Anything out of the ordinary was weighed and scrutinized as their paranoia saw plots and resistance everywhere.

Nevertheless, when her eyes met his, something genuine passed between them. A knowing, a connection on a deeper level. Without saying a word, they both heard the echo of one another’s stories. They had both been lonely for so long, courageously enduring hardships within their own worlds, and somehow they had survived and were now reaching out to one another.

no gas or electricity getting through, and they didn’t even have hot water. Hannah did like to go to work a couple of times a week just to keep on top of the mail.

Josef eyed his cat. Dantes was the only one who seemed to fare well through the time, converting back to his natural instincts and hunting rats and mice. Josef was always wary of letting him outdoors now, though; people were becoming so desperate that they had stooped to eating cats and dogs. By the late winter, he had no longer attended the university, which had been closed because of the war. Each day he tried to find food and conserve his energy,

“This is all I have left, just dusty things.” “But you have your strength and your great capacity to love. Only a person that loved so deeply and has been loved back like this could be as selfless as you have been with me. That is so much more than just dusty memories,” Michael said to him

That week, the desperation of the famine had been lessened by humanitarian food drops that were organized by the Allies. Instead of bombs, the mighty Lancasters released care packages filled with tinned food, flour, peas, coffee, sugar, dried egg powder and chocolate. Grateful Dutch rushed out into the fields to greet the planes, waving flags and holding up their signs of thanks.

The two men shared a look that reassured the other that they both understood this kind of pain. The pain of never being able to go back and right a wrong, a mistake that had cost somebody dear to them their life.

And I realized that I had been holding onto the pain, holding onto the loss, because I was afraid that if I let go, that somehow I would dishonor her memory and would lose even more of her. But now I realize after so many years of the grief and hurt, that the opposite is true and by holding onto the pain, I have not allowed any love back into my life. I have survived. But now I have to learn to live.”

“One doesn’t know how brave one is until the cost outweighs the fear.”

The immense sense of guilt almost overwhelmed her. She felt the weight of that and tried to imagine how soldiers on the battlefield felt having to deal with this guilt and loss on a daily basis. There was something so wrong about war, something so horrific and soul-destroying that she hadn’t ever contemplated, until now, as the senseless loss of life crushed her. On one side you were crippled by it; on the other side you were the perpetrator of it. There were no winners in this awful reality.

That’s when it struck her. The ideals that they had all felt so pompous about, so self-righteous indulging in, the superior world they were creating for the fatherland, was nothing more than a tragic illusion. An illusion that shattered in front of her as she looked up into his terrifying eyes. She realized in that instant what they had all become. This war had done this to all of them, and she despised it. She despised herself.

As he wandered aimlessly from room to room, he was tortured by how empty his life felt without someone in it to care for. In the middle of the night, when he could not sleep with the weight of his insignificance, he would often find solace walking the attic boards, staring through the cracked pane, across the red rooftops often bathed in moonlight, reading Michael’s poems.

The memories of her and Eva, and her family, and so many friends that she had been robbed of stung her. What had it all been about? What had it all been for? Somehow to her, the victory felt hollow, some cruel joke of freedom when all she felt was bound. Bound to a past and to people who no longer existed except in her heart.

Then as time went on she began to open up about her painful experience that echoed so many that Hannah was hearing about, terrifying things, inhuman atrocities that had been done to so many people. Even though Eva was relieved to be safe, fear seemed to cling to her and her childlike optimism never surfaced again. She suffered terrible nightmares, and Hannah would often find her staring out of the window, as if looking for those people who would never come home again.