Petra Keller (1902-1970)

In the aftermath of WW2 a desperate but unsentimental German woman sees a business opportunity that most would miss. How would you judge her?

The house was in Newton, Boston, with an Edwardian front porch and a well-kept rose garden in front. Dr. Levine opened the door and looked at Petra only briefly as she asked

“You were expecting me Herr Levine?”

but his gaze was drawn by the two children, holding her hands, quiet and accepting, they being the only reason that their lives intersected, at such a pleasant point in this deadly hate filled world.

She had dressed them in matching outfits, yellow for the girl and green for the boy. The Reich had taught her to sew and the voyage across the Atlantic had been long. The discipline of following the pattern was enjoyable but she put in a few deliberate quirks of her own design, which she could see even now on the boy’s collar, a German coat of arms in a slightly paler green that nobody but she might notice.

The paperwork took longer than Petra expected.

Levine was thorough in examining all the documents, many of them fake but easily good enough to prove that these orphans of the European catastrophe had no family that could have a claim on them.  The price was $10,000. She could have got $7000 for each of the children separately but could not face splitting them. They were twins who had survived the carpet bombing of Pforzheim. She wasn’t sentimental but there was a limit even to her ability to the harden her heart.

“You absolutely sure they aren’t Jewish?” he asked as he hesitated over his final signature.

“Born in Germany in 1940? How would they be Jewish and alive? They’re as Arian as Beowolf. That’s what you asked for.” It was true as far as she knew. The kids had no idea what they were.

“Well they’re f*****g Jewish now.”

There were plenty of Jewish orphans leaking into America, being placed in high families.  But he was motivated by revenge, not pity. He wanted two gentiles. Burn in hell mein Fuhrer.  We won. You lost. We live. You rot.

Before she left she knelt down in front of the twins and took their little hands in hers.

Halten Sie sich aneinander fest!

Hold on to each other! She hoped Levine would treat them well. Putting blonde German children through Bahmitzvah should be revenge enough.  She could do no more for them.  At least they were out of Europe and she was $6000 richer after unavoidable expenses, including the return trip.

Judge Henry Emerson: Petra Keller, the cold heartedness of your business model is hard for us, who have concentrated our nation’s single-minded effort against tyranny for this past tragic decade, to comprehend.  This great state of Mississippi has lost twenty-two thousand of our youngest and bravest to the defeat of Germany to liberate not only the children of Zion but the children of the Reich. Yet you have conceived the most appalling scheme to exploit these same vulnerable and guiltless children for base pecuniary interest.

Dresden was bad but Pforzheim was worse. On February 23, 1945 the British air-force destroyed 83 per cent of the town’s centre including the medieval old city, killing 17,600 inhabitants in just 22 minutes. Allied command saw only a city of skilled artisans who might produce precision instruments useful to the German war effort. Three months later Berlin would fall demonstrating the fantasy of a German resurgence. Clearly mercy was in short supply amongst those planning the Allied retaliation. Who can judge anyone from that period now?

Children are more resilient than we expect, else none of us would be here. Adults break and crush and panic and suffocate but children accept and adapt and bend and fit into small spaces.

They emerged like corpses from under rubble, covered in cement dust, yellow and pink from the piss and blood of burial, yet their young lungs were easily cleared with a few sobbing coughs. And then there was just the death of compassion and the end of civilisation for them to confront.

There were abandoned hungry kinder on every second corner, unwilling to either hope or give in to despair, just looking out at the world as we once looked out on the African veldt. There was no longer a functioning state to pick up these shattered pieces. Renate and Manfred were six, holding hands in a vice like grip, when Petra saw them and had her great business idea. Nobody would take care of these children over the next few years. There was just too much to repair across the rest of Europe. Soon there would be literally millions of adults trying to get to the new world. Germans would be at the end of the queue, even German children. Pure Aryan German children? It hit Petra like a bolt from heaven.

American Jews.

It took two months before they would call her “Mama”. She traded sex for food when she could and kept them well fed and sheltered until the Americans arrived. She spoke English well enough that she was given temporary papers, which were as good as permanent in practice. The soldiers were not in a mind to interrogate a single mother with twins amongst the bedlam of occupied Germany.

Ilse was a complication. She was 12 and could easily have been swallowed into the back streets and dark places. The twins, as it turned out they were, clung to Petra harder than they had ever thought to cling to their real mother. She needed a baby-sitter while she was scrounging and scamming the city during the day. After six months Petra managed to get Ilse papers as well. She would not be as easy to off-load but she was smart and would be able to work for her passage. At worst, she could just stay in America and melt into the immigrant underworld.

Judge Henry Emerson: You have claimed that the sales were in the interests of these children and, rather shamelessly in the opinion of this court, that bringing up Aryan orphans as American Jews was a form of poetic revenge against the Reich, the same Reich that you served for over a decade in several capacities and of which, your record suggests, you were at the very least a passive supporter. The court rejects the claim that your motives were anything else than selfish and cynical.

They left from Rostock on a merchant ship for $1200 passage, which provided food and one room for her and three children, so long as she and Ilse helped in the kitchen. The berth next door was empty as it turned out, so she had a private place to take some of the more enthusiastic merchant seaman who were far from port.

The air was freezing in the Baltic and got no warmer as they entered the Atlantic yet she made sure that they all got at least half an hour of fresh air on the deck each day. This was something her mother had always stressed to her, that every German should see the sky and breathe God’s open air, lest they waste away and shrivel into small limited creatures.

During the night she sewed and knitted. As she coaxed the formless yarns into functional patterns she meditated on how everything in life fitted into everything else, how cause comes before effect but how effects can generate new causes, and mostly of how schemes can become unwoven by carelessness and ends left unfinished. The older girl, Ilse, would watch her from her bunk, her eyes sleepy but held open by her curious spirit as much as by her perpetual habit of anxiety. She had spoken a little of the horrors she had seen but Petra had not pressed her for more. She would speak of these things when she was ready, which perhaps would be never at all.

Six nights per week they would assist in the kitchen.

Petra soaked the dried fruit, peeled and cut the vegetables, glazed them in a hot pan, de-boned and spiced the meat and boiled the bones for stock. From the earliest age, she had been taught to sing rousing Teutonic songs as an essential aid to labour. The head cook hated Germans and yelled abuse at her. But she would slowly begin again when he was distracted and eventually he got used to the melodies and even learned some of her harsh German gibberish. Petra would play around with the lyrics sometimes. Cook would not know the difference but it often made Ilse laugh out loud as she washed the dishes and pans.

Judge Henry Emerson: We come now to the death of the child known as Ilse, but whose origins remain opaque, not least because of your forging her identity documents. According to autopsy, she was in such poor health that she should never have made the voyage you demanded of her. The sepsis that consumed her was a foreseeable consequence of living in a confined space as well as regular exposure to  cold weather which you have testified that you deliberately imposed upon her, based it seems on some Teutonic faith that harsh conditions will temper the soul of any pure born Arian child who accepts their destiny and embraces it. Her death is a stain upon your soul which even the verdict of this court will, I fear, not wipe clean.

Three weeks into the voyage, Ilse took sick. They thought it was sea sickness at first though she had already been through that on the second day of the voyage. After several days, she was not keeping down food or water.

Petra took her to the ship’s doctor, a thin hard man of about fifty, whose consultation rooms were on the second lowest deck, the sound of the engines throbbing through the wall and the heat of the boiler room leaking through the floor. His relationship with gin was the only thing that got him from day to interminable day. As she listed each symptom, he would exhale and sigh as if his soul were leaking out of a poorly stitched seam. Several alarm bells were sounding in his mind, but what could he do?  None of the more dire possible diagnoses were treatable on a merchant ship in the north Atlantic.

With any luck, it was just food poisoning. If so, it was probably the girl’s own fault since she washed all the dishes in the ship’s galley.

Petra moved Ilse to the other cabin so as not to risk infecting the twins Renate and Manfred. They knew she was sick but not how gravely. In any case, they were used to death, which to them meant the habit of important characters in their life leaving the stage for no apparent reason.

Ilse died three days later.

It would be the standard procedure to bury her at sea. But Petra had a revulsion at the thought of the body sinking to the bottom of the ocean. It was too dark a metaphor for falling into the black abyss of oblivion, which she feared was the real and only meaning of death. So, she hid the body in a crate. Ilse was presumed to have fallen overboard, in a delirium cause by serious illness.

After the twins were sold, Petra booked her ticket back to Europe for the next day. The man at customs examined her passport, looked at her face and photo, and went into the adjacent room. After several minutes she was taken to another room to questioning. Schemes can become unwoven by careless ends left unfinished.

They had found Ilse’s body from the smell. Normally a corpse would not decompose so quickly. Perhaps it was her illness. Petra could not give a clear account of why she had hidden the body but it led them to examine her documents. They found the address of Dr. Levine and then the twins whose forged documents contained small but decisive flaws.

Judge Henry Emerson: Your negligence and base desire for profit resulted in the death of an innocent child. I sentence you to 10 years in the Parchman Prison Mississippi State Penitentiary, for criminal women. Do you have anything to say?

The pompous blue blood had hated here from the start. Petra had already factored in at least eight years. Before leaving Europe she had even done research on how best to prevail in an American jail as a foreign woman, just in case. She had only got as far as she had because she planned for the worst. It’s not enough to just weigh the possibilities.

She cleared her throat and addressed the judge.

“In a thousand years nobody will remember me. Which is just as well and suits my temperament. But not yours I wager. Perhaps in the far future someone will read your judgement and realise what a thoughtless and prejudiced man you are and what a shallow system you presided over, in this tiny unimportant state of a conceited empire of united states that will never last a thousand years. The ruins of the Reich which your children overwhelmed attest to this inevitability.”

A cell mate had helped her write it in perfect and articulate English.

Judge Emerson had already given her the maximum ten years. There was nothing to lose.

 

Author's Note

I have written a novel about the afterlife. I have 6 short stories (and another 6 planned) about the earthly life of some of the characters. Those who reach the after-life are not ordinary people. The purpose of these stories is to hint at what they have in common. But I hope that they work as stand-alone stories.