A Perfect Madness Page 3

THREE

  Prague, 1938

  It was during the second year of his medical studies at the German University in Prague that Erich fell in love with Julia. Madly in love, is the better term, with a Czech student in her medical studies also, who just happened to be a Jew. “Not just a Jew,” he would say to other German students who questioned him about such a precarious relationship, but a brilliant, beautiful woman, aspiring to be a doctor like he was soon to become. Yet, it was the worst of times for lovers such as they. With the Anschluss in Austria now complete, Hitler was looking eastward to the Sudetenland and Prague itself. What was happening to the Jews in Germany only compounded the fears of those living in Czechoslovakia. Still, whether it was plain foolishness, or plain passion, Erich and Julia seemed to believe the times didn’t matter. Their love was real, and they thought themselves different from all that was around them. However, their world would matter to his father, Erich knew, and for now, he could say nothing to him of Julia and his love for her.

  Julia had entered his heart and life one autumn morning coming through the forward door of the large classroom, quite late to a special lecture on Husserl’s phenomenology. Hesitating for a second, surveying the crowded six-tiered rows of students, she spotted the empty seat next to Erich and immediately moved to it, dropping her books loudly on the table.

  “Good morning, Erich Schmidt, I am Julia Kaufmann,” she proclaimed boldly, glancing his way before turning quickly to face the large blackboard on which Professor Edelstein was busily scribbling a series of Socratic questions for the class to consider.

  Though they had been in the class together for one week, Erich had paid little attention to Julia until this morning, as he watched her move rapidly with an unusual grace to the vacant seat beside him. A grace on grace, he would later call it. She was short and petite, with long, flowing raven hair and deep-set eyes full of laughter, the kind you like seeing life through, and skin so femininely delicate one would shy to touch for fear of harming it. She was beautiful, was all Erich could think, just beautiful. What would eventually capture Erich’s heart, though, was that which few could see until they knew her: an irrepressible liberation and beauty of the soul that could exist in the worst of times.

  For the next several sessions, Erich sat behind Julia, or in front of her, but always near her. Before class and after, furtive glances would be exchanged between them—sometimes a nod, but nothing more, as if saying the game would go no further. Finally, perhaps emboldened by the intense morning discussion on the ancient Greek virtue of courage, Erich walked straight to Julia at the end of class, and in the firmest voice he could muster announced his interest in her.

  “I am going to the Old Town Café for morning coffee and would like very much for you to join me.”

  Julia waited several seconds before responding to the invitation she had secretly hoped would soon come from him.

  “Are you sure that is what you want?”

  “Certainly. Why do you ask?”

  “I am Jewish and you are, well, German. The days are becoming extraordinarily difficult for the Jews there.”

  “I know, but this is Prague, not Germany.”

  “Prague may not be different either. Hate has its own legs, and has a way of moving on. There is much angry propaganda here now against the Jews—the Nazis are good at that.”

  “Things will settle down, I’m sure. Anyway, we’re just two small people in all that is happening. So, will you have coffee with me?”

  “Yes, but first I must talk with my father; he will want to meet you. Then perhaps tomorrow we can share a table together,” Julia said, smiling as she turned from Erich and walked away.

  Meeting Julia’s father and asking his permission to take her to a café for coffee seemed so formal and wasn’t what Erich had expected from her. His whole life had been formal, regimented by a father that followed only one path in life: tradition. As a father, he was undemonstrative and could neither share his feelings with his family nor deal with the feelings they had for him. He had never uttered the words “I love you” to Erich, or to anyone else in the family, and Erich often wondered how he and his mother ever got to the marrying stage. Any sex between them had to be an expected formality of marriage, nothing more. From the day he first could remember being in time, every waking moment seemed regimented. It was only in the dark shadows of the night that his imagination became free to think of things that might be. And as he neared manhood, it seemed to Erich, in looking back on his life, that all of his childhood had been collapsed into a single afternoon. And even then he pretended love was always there, or something like it, until the day it came to him with Julia. Nothing he had experienced growing up in his family had prepared him for the emotions he felt the moment Julia first touched his hand, nor the warmth afterwards. From then on, he believed that love could grow many different blossoms because the seed was the same in everyone, planted in us at birth by God. Dried up long ago by the arid formalities of his own father and mother, he had simply failed to nourish it, and it had died. He liked to believe it was still there in his father, too, perhaps, thirsting for the wellspring of human touch.

  Yet doctoring came easy to Erich, though not by choice. It was a necessity for his salvation if he wanted to remain a Schmidt, because it was a tradition. Both his father and grandfather had studied with the great bacteriologist Koch at his institute in Berlin, eagerly embracing the new science and the miraculous revolution it was bringing to medicine. Though doctoring was in Erich’s blood, his mind fancied other intellectual disciplines much more than medicine, especially the fields of philosophy and theology. In 1926 this fancy was confirmed. At age seventeen, he reluctantly accompanied his father to attend a conference being held at the renowned eugenics research institution in Cold Springs Harbor, New York. There the exciting new world of eugenics swirled around Erich and his father like the newness of early spring winds, though he quickly developed a distaste for its radical preaching. Led by an American doctor, Charles Davenport, and the renowned German physician-geneticist, Fritz Lenz, social Darwinism moved to center stage carried on the arms of a science already showing the first signs of a madness that was yet to come, one that would hark back to the ancient Greeks when wholeness was the norm, and anything less was unworthy of life. If all that we have built as an advanced civilization is to be preserved, cleansing the gene pools by sterilizing the unfit must become the scientific standard, Davenport and Lenz and many of the other leading scientists attending the conference loudly proclaimed.

  With Erich fidgeting by his side, Dr. Schmidt listened in awe to the major scientific papers underscoring the sweeping eugenics passion in the United States for sterilizing criminals and mental patients and prohibiting marriage between people of different races. Some went even further in their rush to embrace the glorious movement, like Foster Kennedy, whose pronouncements quickly caught the ears of Dr. Lenz and his fellow Germans, especially when he openly suggested the whispered word, “euthanasia.”

  “Why not, with Christian compassion, euthanize the mentally disturbed, the physically unfit who threaten mankind’s very existence,” he would say and write.

  “Compassionate euthanasia,” the coined phrase being tossed about so casually by many at the conference, troubled Erich greatly. He had been thinking about existence lately and the miracle of life, and it seemed to him to be the most remarkable thing that one could ever imagine, coming into this world as we do, as nothing more than a piece of protein. Everything we have been and everything we will become is tied up in that small world, a microscopic glob of molecules that somehow stays connected to our ancient history. So each day, until his father admonished him for doing so, he would ask the same question to those who would listen: “How could we even begin to think of ending another person’s existence when that was all he would ever have?”

  Politically, though, Theodore Roosevelt himself had years earlier endorsed the eugenics effort to save humanity (which did impress Erich considerably), whil
e on the social scene, the idea became quite fashionable with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s snappy song “Love or Eugenics” floating melodiously across nightclub dance floors all over America. Even the revered Supreme Court muscled its way into the act in a sickening case involving a state’s request to sterilize a young mentally disabled woman. On a dismally cold and cloudy day when the sun refused to shine, perhaps as an omen of terrible deeds to come, the great Justice Holmes strode to the bench and, uttering the words “Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” unhooked the moral reins holding science and medicine back. Shortly thereafter the shameful sterilization of 40,000 mentally disabled women rolled across America like a giant tsunami.

  What puzzled and bothered Erich more than what the scientists were advocating, though, was the large number of theologians and ministers, and even rabbis, who had lined up behind Charles Davenport and his colleagues in science, when what they were advocating was clearly wrong, at least in his young mind. Perhaps America was not the stately and righteous guardian of human rights the rest of the world believed it to be.

  “What is there to keep us from crossing the line, from becoming far less than what God intends us to be?” he asked his father boldly one afternoon, as they were standing amid a crowd of American doctors.

  Quickly silenced by his father’s cold stare, he wandered outside the conference hall and looked eastward across the harbor and ocean to where he imagined Europe might be. Everything is changing, he mused. What we are today, we may not be tomorrow. For a moment he thought of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s sorrowful story of the fanatical scientist who becomes obsessed with his beautiful wife’s single flaw, a crimson birthmark on her otherwise flawless cheek. Determined to rid her of this sinful imperfection, he creates a powerful potion to make the mark disappear, which it does, but his wife also dies. Hawthorne and Emerson were the only two American writers Erich found any enjoyment in reading, because they seemed to embrace Nietzsche’s criticism of the paramount ideal of human perfection being so eagerly embraced by science and society. He wasn’t ready for this new world of medicine like his father was.

  “What a glorious day for all of humanity,” Dr. Schmidt shouted out, while standing on the deck of their ship, to a flight of sea gulls swooping low over the tops of the breaking waves, searching for their morning meal. “Darwin’s survival of the fittest can now be manipulated by science, and we, the scientists, the keepers of the faith, will set the moral bar for all of civilization to follow.”

  Erich hardly knew his father at times, and never before had he seen him so joyously arrogant as he was at this moment. What seemed to impress his father most, though, was the rapid enactment of laws throughout America providing for compulsory sterilization of the criminally insane and other people considered genetically inferior.

  “America, that bulwark of liberty, is leading the world in preserving the human race, and Germany must seize the lead in cleansing the Aryan race,” he would repeat over and over to Erich, like a broken record, as they left the conference for home. What was to follow would bring Erich to Prague and to Julia.

  The second morning at sea Dr. Schmidt suddenly began humming Fitzgerald’s popular song. “We must find and buy a copy of that song,” he said, stopping the incessant humming for a second.

  “It is only a catchy song, nothing more,” Erich replied, disgusted and embarrassed by his father’s childish actions.

  “No, it sings out loud what the American people are really thinking. They’re afraid that the advanced races of mankind are skating backwards, sliding down a slippery slope to be swallowed up one day by ignorance. We must sing the same song to those who will listen.”

  Erich shook his head. Never before had such unbridled giddiness pushed out from his father’s strict bearing. He seemed almost human. It was as if he had been suddenly swept up in the “rapture.”

  “We too must become part of this sacred mission,” his father continued babbling.

  “What are you talking about? What mission?”

  “To save the great Aryan race from extinction. What else? We will embrace the National Socialist movement like Lenz, who is committed to such a mission.”

  Erich rose from his deck chair and walked to the railing, joining several other passengers looking at the angry ocean surrounding them. The beckoning waters had been there an eternity, he knew, churning and rolling and giving birth to all life. They would still be there long after Germany and the Aryan race had been erased by God and returned to dust.

  Looking back at his father, Erich saw nothing, only the tradition he hated. He had no desire to follow in the footsteps of his father. Healing and touching sick bodies was distasteful to him. Instead, it was the sick mind that roiled and captured his interest. The growing field of psychiatry would bring him the fame he had long imagined, and possibly a distinguished professorship in a few years alongside the great German psychiatrists at Berlin University and Munich, or even the German University in Prague, where the great intellectual movement in Prague had first reached out to him. Kafka and the other great writers of the Prague Circle were there alongside the city’s artists and men of letters. Philosophy and the metaphysical presence of being were open for the world to see and study. What he had to do was leave his studies at Berlin University to go there.

  Having looked at the rising and falling horizon too long, Erich felt nauseated and returned to the chair next to his father to rest.

  “You have turned green,” his father said, amused. “A bouncing horizon is not something to favor too long.”

  “Let me rest my head a few minutes and we will talk some more.”

  After a few minutes, Erich turned to his father and picked up the disturbing conversation again.

  “Father, you cannot join the National Socialist movement. It is political; you are a doctor, a physician, a defender of the Hippocratic Oath—not a politician.”

  “You are so pitifully young and wrong, Erich. Hereditary health is before us now, tugging at us. It’s not something we must wait for. You saw with your own eyes what is taking place in America. They are leading the way, but soon they will follow Germany.”

  “And do what?”

  “Sterilize all of the unfit, not just a few, and even develop a racial policy. The black man has no standing there.”

  “And Germany?”

  “My boy, listen: biological laws are the laws of life and National Socialism is nothing more than applied biology. We must purify the Aryan race if Germany’s health is to survive, and that will be the physician’s task, yours and mine—don’t forget that.”

  “That is nonsense and evil, Father. I’ve never heard you speak like this before.”

  “Why? Treating the hereditarily sick by sterilization should be seen as a God-given blessing. Think of all of the mentally disabling illnesses that will be eliminated. What a utopia to live in.”

  “What about the Jews? Will we sterilize them, too?

  “No, I would think not, though they do intermarry at times with other races, which they shouldn’t do. Perhaps prohibiting them from doing so would be enough. They are doing that now in America between the Negro and the white person.”

  Erich stood up, leaning against a cabin wall for support. Not only was he deathly seasick, he was sick of his father’s ramblings. Finally he said in a faint voice, challenging his father, “I will not be a part of this nonsense. Prague is where I will be in the fall to study philosophy and psychology and finish my medical training, not Germany. They don’t speak of such trash there, only of the liberation of the mind.”

  So Erich did go to Prague to finish his preliminary medical studies for the coming years of clinical training. There the great writings of Husserl and Freud and Jung saturated his daily thoughts, leaving little time to think of home and Germany. Never had his mind and soul been so free. His father, now alienated from him, had joined the National Socialist party, marching in lockstep with its racial ideology of cleansing the Aryan race. But Erich had no time for suc
h madness. He would go home to Dresden only twice during his years away, then only to see his mother whom he cared deeply for. And it was when he returned from home the second time that he would seek Julia’s companionship.

  After asking Julia to have coffee with him, Erich was indeed summoned, as he later would laughingly refer to it, to her home for a formal introduction to her father, Dr. Jiri Kaufmann, a distinguished professor of psychiatry at Charles University. The confidence Erich initially felt as he set out for the encounter quickly abandoned him the moment he crossed the Old Town square and entered Josefov, the ancient Jewish quarters. Though many Jewish families lived outside the quarters, Dr. Kaufmann resided in the same small house on Kaprova Street that his father had, and his grandfather before him, only a stone’s throw from Maisel Synagogue, where his family had worshipped the Hebrew God for over 150 years. He had met and married Julia’s mother there, a good and gentle woman by everyone’s account. Together they represented ten generations of Jewish blood in Prague.

  Erich stood in front of the small stone house looking up and down Kaprova, which seemed empty of all life except for an ugly stray dog on the corner, barking loudly at him. He wondered how many secret eyes had been watching from behind the drawn curtains as he walked past the row of houses leading to Julia’s. Tomorrow, Mrs. Kaufmann would spend the day explaining his evening presence in their neighborhood.

  Julia opened the front door as he started through the walkway gate.

  “I was afraid you might not come. But believe me, to Father some traditions are still worth holding on to, even though it is 1938.”

  “It’s a stretch for just a cup of coffee,” Erich said, laughing as he followed Julia into a small study where Dr. Kaufmann stood alone in front of dark wooden shelving stacked with medical texts and journals.

  “Father, this is Erich Schmidt, one of my classmates at the university.”

  Erich stepped forward with his hand extended but was met with a disarming silence by Dr. Kaufmann. Unnerved by the awkward moment, Erich glanced nervously around the study, then at Julia. This wasn’t what he had expected. Dr. Kaufmann’s rudeness would be the easiest way to dismiss him from Julia’s life, Erich thought, just as Dr. Kaufmann turned to face him.

  “Please forgive my manners, Erich. My mind has been running back and forth between German and Czech, trying to find the appropriate words. While I prefer Czech, it seems everyone is speaking German these days in Prague, which perhaps is trying to tell us something,” Dr. Kaufmann said, leading Erich by the arm into the living room, where Mrs. Kaufmann was busily filling magnificent gold-rimmed cups with freshly brewed coffee.

  “Please sit down, Erich. We will speak German.”

  Erich sat down on a small settee facing Dr. Kaufmann and Julia, who was sitting next to her father. He still couldn’t fathom the formality of what was happening. Everything seemed so weirdly strange to him. It was as if he should now ask for Julia’s hand in marriage. In his twenty-eight years of living, being here visiting in Julia’s home was only the second time for him to be in a Jewish home. Few Jewish families had lived near his home in Dresden, and those that did, kept mostly to themselves. He knew only a few of the neighbors by name, and one Jewish boy who lived several streets away. It was in his house that he sat the one time drinking a cool glass of water on a very hot afternoon. One day during summer recess with his father away, he had journeyed through the neighborhood, wandering several streets away from home. Benjamin Keiler was tossing through the air a small airplane made of balsa, when he came upon him. Watching the futile efforts of Benjamin to make the plane sail farther then a few feet before plunging to the ground, Erich asked if he might try, which he did. But he had even less success with his flying skills and felt ashamed he had asked to try. In a while, Benjamin’s mother called him to come inside for a cool drink, and he took Erich with him. They had become friends for the afternoon, that was all, and Erich never saw Benjamin again, nor his family. When he returned to his own house that day, he said nothing to his mother about where he had been. Not that she would have minded, but that she would tell his father, who cared even then nothing for Jews, even those holding prestigious professorships at Berlin University. Erich thought more about Benjamin’s house that night in bed than he did about trying to fly the plane. While there he had been intrigued with a lone candle burning in the living room where they sat drinking the cool water, and believed it must be some kind of witchcraft, but was afraid to ask. The Lutherans burned candles, too, he knew—in church, though, where it made some sense to do so, not in the home. Sensing Erich’s uneasiness, Julia smiled and leaned forward to offer him a bagel that her mother had baked earlier in the morning.

  “You’ll find these much better than the ones served in the coffee houses.”

  “Yes, I will try one. Thank you,” Erich said, deciding to play along with the proper game of manners being displayed by his hosts. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a lone candle burning on a small table in the foyer, very similar to the one he remembered burning in Benjamin Keiler’s home, and turned to look at it.

  “The candle is in memory of my father,” Dr. Kaufmann said quickly, noticing Erich’s interest. “It is a Jewish tradition to light a candle on the anniversary of a loved one’s death. Do you not do the same?”

  “No, I might visit a grave with my parents, that is all,” Erich responded, beginning to feel uneasy by the direction of the question. He knew nothing about Jewish customs, and really didn’t care to know. Their religious beliefs had always been sort of mystical to him, with weird intonations from a rabbi that seemed to make little sense.

  “Julia has asked permission to visit with you away from the university,”

  Dr. Kaufmann said, smiling for the first time. “You may think it strange that she must request permission at her age, but things may start to unravel here soon as they already have in your country.”

  “I would hope not. Czechoslovakia is a sovereign country,” Erich replied, glancing again at the burning candle, which he now enjoyed, knowing its meaning.

  “Have you noticed the increasing number of refugees coming into Prague from Germany—mostly Jews, I’m afraid, and some gypsies?”

  “No sir, I haven’t,” Erich replied, trying hard to look straight at Dr. Kaufmann. “Actually, I have little interest in politics. Becoming a doctor is all I want to do.”

  From the frown on Dr. Kaufmann’s face, Erich knew immediately his detached response to the question was not what Dr. Kaufmann wanted to hear from him.

  “You are aware of the Nürnberg Laws that prohibit German citizens from associating with Jews?” Dr. Kaufmann asked in a more unwelcoming tone of voice.

  “Yes. But I really don’t care. We are in Prague, not Germany. Julia could be a Bedouin Arab and I would still want to have coffee with her.”

  “Are you a Christian, Erich?” Dr. Kaufmann asked, carefully measuring Erich’s mannerisms now as if he were a patient.

  “Would it make any difference if I weren’t?” Erich replied in a sharp tone, turning the strange questioning back on Dr. Kaufmann, who seemed surprised by his hostile reaction.

  “No, no, it would perhaps help me understand you better, if I knew more about how a Christian looks at what is happening to the Jews here in our small corner of the world. Please forgive me if I’ve offended you.”

  Julia suddenly stood up, her eyes bristling with frustration.

  “Father, forgive me, but this questioning is all nonsense. We are talking about going to a coffee house where other students gather, not a formal engagement.”

  “You are right, Julia, the coffee house is fine; there will be nothing further though, nothing serious. You do understand, Erich?” Dr. Kaufmann said, leaving the room, taking his coffee cup with him.

  Yet the chemistry between Erich and Julia deepened, as each knew it would and desperately wanted. Visits to the coffee houses after classes became treasured moments that were soon followed by weekly dinners at Julia’s home,
an insistence at first by her father as a way of gauging Erich’s true feelings and intentions towards Julia, being ever mindful of the insane babblings of Hitler now filling the airways in Prague and the rest of the Republic. In time, it would become unsafe for them to be seen together, he knew. But as the weeks passed, Dr. Kaufmann’s fears and those of Mrs. Kaufmann gave way to a growing respect and friendship with Erich. Long discussions in Dr. Kaufmann’s study would follow the dinners, on subjects of every genre. And in time, Erich became more certain than ever that psychiatry was his future. Understanding the complex intricacies of the mind could eventually uncover the soul itself, he believed and stated to Dr. Kaufmann. And then, the demons that haunt so many people could be dispelled forever. He also began to acquire an elementary knowledge of the Jewish faith, which had been largely absent throughout his studies in the Lutheran schools he attended as a child.

  One evening, for no particular reason, he posed a question that puzzled not only Dr. Kaufmann but Julia as well, because of its isolated detachment from their conversation on Jungian thought.

  “Jews sometimes seem to think they have a monopoly on suffering, don’t they, Dr. Kaufmann?”

  But Dr. Kaufmann was quick to answer.

  “Yes, but only where there is no reason for it except being a Jew.”

  And with that the evening dialogues were over. Later, walking back to his apartment, Erich stopped at the edge of the Old Town square and sat down on the steps in front of St. Nicholas Church, looking at Kafka’s house next to it, to think on his question about suffering. The Lutherans in Germany, and most of the Catholics with them, seemed to care little about what was happening to the Jews there. Yet, to think on their long suffering in Europe would make a stone weep. There had to be something deeper to cause Germany and the rest of Europe to want Jews to suffer. It made no sense otherwise, he thought. He had no answer though, and thought perhaps Julia would bring the truth to him, as she always seemed to do.

  In December, during the holidays, Dr. Kaufmann was overly anxious to begin the evening discussion, but in a more somber mood. As he lifted a journal from his study desk, Erich and Julia and her brother Hiram, who sometimes joined in their discussions, hurriedly gathered around him like little children might do in anticipation of hearing a wonderful magical story. Dr. Kaufmann opened the journal, The Archive of Racial and Social Biology, and began to read from an article authored jointly by Dr. Ernst Rudin, a Swiss-born psychiatrist of international renown, and Dr. Viktor Schmidt, Erich’s father. The article was titled “Steps Toward Making Racial Hygiene a Fact Among the German People.” From his prestigious position as director of the Research Institution for Psychiatry of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in Munich, Rudin had enlisted Erich’s father and others working at the institute to become Nazis. The surprising article concluded by praising the Nürnberg Laws for preventing the further penetration of the German gene pool by Jewish blood. Stunned and ashamed, Erich bowed his head between his hands, saying nothing. His father had finally crossed the line, was all he could think. But what Dr. Kaufmann did not read to Erich and Julia was his father’s solemn exhortation that the individual physician must become a genetics doctor, a guardian of the Nordic race. Dr. Kaufmann knew the emotional pain that passage would cause Erich.

  Dr. Kaufmann gave the article to him. “I’m sorry to spring such shameful words on you this way, Erich. You may have the journal and do with it what you like; but you should never disavow your father, only his words and what he stands for.”

  Erich looked at both Julia and her father. How far his emotions had traveled to love, as he did, these two good and gentle people: Dr. Kaufmann, who had become his mentor, and his dear Julia, whom he had fallen so deeply in love with. He had disavowed the Nürnberg Laws when they were enacted, and in doing so, spread denial in his mind to the horrific probability that was sure to follow—the extermination of the German Jew. What he must do, he vowed to himself like a young warrior called to a sacred mission, was to hurry to finish his studies at the university and quickly return to Germany, where he could speak as a doctor against the genetic madness sweeping through the medical profession. He had been away too long. But now Erich wanted only to cling to the goodness surrounding Julia and her family like the encircling arms of Mother Mary.

  Erich rose from his chair and laid the article on Dr. Kaufmann’s desk. Before he could speak, Julia touched his hand, then held it tightly.

  “There is a sadness in our hearts for the terrible pain you must feel,” she said, kissing him softly on his cheek.

  “Several years back my father spoke of this craziness when we visited the eugenics institution in America. Nothing was said of the Jews, only the misfits, the insane and physically disabled. I am ashamed. No doctor should take comfort in such foolishness.”

  Dr. Kaufmann stood behind his study desk for a second more, looking at Julia and Erich holding hands.

  “These days are not the best of times for a Jewish girl and a German boy to be in love,” he said, trying to smile. “Evil always seems to find a way of emptying the heart of everything that is good.”

  After he had left the room, Julia embraced Erich, clinging to him as they walked to the front door.

  “Surely nothing will come of this, will it?”

  Erich did not respond, but peered into the cold, dark night waiting on him for the long walk home. Snow mixed with ice was beginning to fall, harkening the advent of the terrible Prague winters. Perhaps another omen, he thought, pulling his jacket tightly around his neck.

  “You must think seriously about leaving Prague, you and your family. Go to England or America,” he shouted back to Julia as he disappeared into the swirling blackness before him.

  ***