Ashes Read Free Page B

neglecting her studies. A university student is supposed to study. That is a reasonable expectation. Nor was she practicing her violin that much. Except for me, everyone in our family was very musical. The music gene “had taken a powder” with me, as my mother would say. That means it vanished. In any case Ulla was very musical. She hoped to go to the Vienna Conservatory, where Papa and Mama had gone, to study violin when she finished her program at the University of Berlin. Mama had performed in many concerts, but now she just taught piano. Papa, before he contracted infantile paralysis—they call it polio sometimes—as a teenager, had been considered a violin prodigy. But his bow arm became useless after his illness, for all the muscles in it had been affected.
    Mama and Papa were very upset with Ulla when she started to practice less. At the rate she was going with her academic studies, her degree might be in doubt, as well as her chances for the conservatory. This had all started when she met Karl. When Karl became her boyfriend, Ulla was suddenly not so interested in her studies—German literature. Her marks had slipped. Karl was a student too at the university. He studied engineering. I didn’t know about his marks.
    Rosa and I were coming to the corner where we normally would part ways. But the day was lovely, end of May, and the air had more than a hint of summer.
    â€œDo you have any money?” Rosa asked suddenly.
    â€œNot much. Just a little. Why?”
    â€œHelmut is working this afternoon. We could catch the last bit of The Blue Angel and then have a coffee at the Little. The movie would be free. Didn’t you say you wanted to see it again? And we could share the coffee.”
    â€œI have enough for that.”
    We walked two more blocks to the tram. Ten minutes later when the tram pulled up to the stop in front of the theater, we saw not a neat, orderly line of people buying tickets for the next show but a sea of brown.
    â€œSchweine,” I muttered as I looked out the tram window.
    â€œHush! Gaby! Don’t go calling them swine,” Rosa whispered.
    â€œLet’s stay on for another stop,” I said quickly. There was no way I was getting off that tram. Not with those Schweine . There were not enough bad words. Scheiss-Sturm , the Shit Storm. That was what Papa called Hitler’s private army, the Sturmabteilung , or SA. There was also the SS, the Schutzstaffel that functioned as Hitler’s personal guard and had been established some years before.
    â€œWhy so many all of a sudden? I don’t understand,” Rosa said.
    â€œLook at the marquee,” I said. “It’s not The Blue Angel playing. It’s All Quiet on the Western Front .” I’d read the book. Papa said it was the best war book ever written. Very sad. Really antiwar. It was all about a young man, a soldier in the Great War. There was a lot of gory stuff about trench warfare—blood, dressing stations where the medics and doctors did field surgery, amputation of arms and legs. I didn’t want to see the movie. I knew there would be parts I couldn’t watch, and there definitely wouldn’t be any glamour girls like Joan Crawford.
    â€œBut still, I don’t understand,” Rosa said, looking out the tram window at the SA in their brown shirts milling about under the marquee. It wasn’t a march, really. The men did not seem organized. But why were they there at all? “I thought they were supposed to have been banned, but Mama went with her friend for lunch at Ciro’s and she said it was all Brown Shirts in there. Suddenly it seems as if they’re all over the city.”
    â€œI don’t think it’s all of a sudden,” I replied as the tram pulled away from the theater. “Last night we were listening to the radio and heard about Brown Shirts breaking up a synagogue service on the east side of the city. And Papa said there was