The Flight. Bryan Malessa

afternoon when Karl and Peter had stood near the doorway to his shop, listening to his stories, Mr Wolff had pulled a stone from his coat pocket. Karl had recognised it as amber – Bernstein. ‘The church was once used as the headquarters where amber disputes were settled,’ Mr Wolff told them. ‘Most of the world’s amber comes from around here.’

      ‘Then why aren’t we rich?’ Karl asked.

      ‘You’re richer than many people. You need not worry about what others think of you.’

      ‘What do you mean?’ Karl asked.

      Mr Wolff ignored his question. Instead he told the boys that long before the church had been designated the Amber Palace, a Jewish trader had been the second person in recorded history to mention the Prussian tribe living on the Baltic coast. Ibrâhim ibn-Ya’qub had travelled to the region from Spain and recorded his findings in Arabic.

      With the baker, Mr Schultze, whose shop stood opposite the butcher’s, Mr Wolff was the only other Jewish person remaining in the village. Of the two, only Mr Schultze had married – a Protestant woman from the capital. In the years after Hitler had been elected to power, the four other Jewish families in Germau had followed the example of those in Königsberg and fled to safer countries. Karl had once overheard his father asking Mr Wolff whether it was wise for him to remain in Germany.

      ‘This is home. Where else would I go?’ Mr Wolff had replied.

      The villagers came to him occasionally as the arbiter in their never-ending disputes over obscure historical events. Since leaving home in his early twenties, Mr Wolff had distanced himself from his religion and focused on the study of history, convinced that intellectual and spiritual pursuits led to a similar end: self-knowledge and inner peace. In his early thirties he had reconsidered his rejection of formal religion after studying the Reformation. Instead of returning to Judaism, though, he had become interested in Protestantism. He didn’t formally convert, but he attended services occasionally and had even led Christians in prayer – for the first time when a family had requested he deliver a coffin to their farm. When he arrived, the widow asked if he would say a few words for her deceased husband, before helping them bury him in the family plot. He had been honoured by her request.

      On the afternoon that Paul had asked him whether it was wise to remain in Germany, he had also asked Mr Wolff who he expected would help him if trouble came. The coffin maker had frowned and made no answer. As time passed, he noticed that the villagers who had once expressed independent views now accepted each new policy without question. It had begun back in 1934 with the banning of Jewish holidays from German calendars. In 1935 Mr Wolff had been excluded from the Armed Forces and forbidden to fly the German flag – which had hurt: he had always been among the first in Germau to raise it on national holidays. Then his citizenship was revoked, in line with the Nuremberg Laws, and in 1936 his assets were taxed an additional twenty-five per cent – all because of his religious heritage.

      The villagers’ acceptance of each new law through the years was unsettling enough, but then, in the months following Paul’s blunt and unsettling question, Mr Wolff had noticed that friends with whom he had always been on good terms slowly began to distance themselves. The days Mr Wolff had once spent busy with work and the evenings once occupied visiting friends were soon replaced by long idle hours alone, the social life he had once cherished slowly withering away to nothing. Although Mr Wolff enjoyed spending time alone during the weekdays working and at weekends studying, he found the prospect of forced solitude disquieting. As he searched deeper and deeper within himself, his forced introspection eventually led back to memories of his childhood. With those memories came the prayers his parents had taught him and images of the temple in which his family had worshipped. As he meditated day after day, he felt himself being pulled towards the very subject for which he was being ostracised, pulled for the first time since leaving his parents’ home back to the sanctity of Judaism.

       Chapter 3

      Early one morning after a heavy snowfall, Mr Wolff left his shop to spend an hour or two studying in the church. He was so isolated from the community now that he no longer cared what anyone thought of his continued historical research in the archives or delving into the peninsula’s Jewish history. He crossed the square and noticed Karl near the foot of the hill. The boy looked up, saw him and ran to him. ‘Where are you going?’ Karl asked.

      ‘To talk to God.’

      Karl looked up at the church. It was Saturday morning. ‘What about?’

      ‘Come with me, if you like, but you’d better ask your mother first.’

      Karl glanced at the shop to see if she was near the window. ‘Will you wait for me?’

      ‘I’ll be in the vestry if you come.’ Mr Wolff set off up the hill.

      Karl watched him for a moment, then ran home. Ida told him to carry in the day’s turf for the fire and he could go after that. When he reached the church he saw that the front door was ajar. He had never been into it alone before. He stood near the back pews and listened, then called Mr Wolff. His voice echoed round the walls, but the response was silence. Karl went back outside and looked around. Mr Wolff ’s footprints in the snow led into the building, but there were none to indicate that he had left. Karl went back inside and looked across the sanctuary to the vestry door. Through it, he could see the edge of a table. He walked up the aisle, glancing at the stained-glass window high above, went to the door and pushed it wide open. Mr Wolff was sitting at the table gazing at him.

      ‘What are you doing?’ Karl asked.

      ‘I told you earlier.’

      ‘Why aren’t you out there?’ Karl pointed to the pews where the villagers sat when they came up to the church alone to pray.

      ‘I like it here. It’s quieter.’ He motioned for Karl to sit down at the other side of the table.

      Karl glanced at the bookshelves lining the walls. He was impressed by Mr Wolff ’s knowledge of history and literature, and wanted to go to the most prestigious school, but only a small percentage of children were admitted to the Adolf Hitler Schools. He daydreamed of being the first in the village to be selected. To him, Mr Wolff was a model of academic excellence, and Mr Wolff knew of his ambition. He had likewise taken an interest in Karl, partly because his inquisitive nature reminded him of himself as a child.

      Karl asked him more about the Knights who had built the church in which they now sat. ‘Is it true that they fought a battle on this hill?’

      ‘It’s true,’ he answered. ‘This hill used to be a lookout for the ancient Prussians. After that battle the German Knights claimed the village for good. But even the ones who died conquering the village didn’t much care.’

      Mr Wolff explained that the highest goal a Knight could attain was not victory in battle, but death at the enemy’s hands. ‘They believed that by defending the Virgin Mary’s honour, they defended her son and in defending her son, they defended God.’ Mr Wolff sometimes recited literary works for Karl; he said that they sometimes called themselves Mary’s Knights or the cult of Mary and that in the fourteenth century they had created a vast body of Mary-verse, which they chanted in private among themselves:

      In the name of God’s mother, the Virgin,

      Virtue’s vessel and shedder of piercing tears,

      for the sake of avenging her only son, our Saviour,

      the renowned and numerous Knights of Mary

      chose death as their destiny and reward,

      and riddled with deep wounds

      kept open through fearlessness and Faith,

      they stood among smashed spears and shields,

      among godless corpses and limbs and heads

      to bleed and redeem with blood

      their rapturous hearts, their singing souls,