Chapter 1: The Last Summer of Normalcy
My father, Isaac Rothchild, ran a watch repair shop on a cobbled street in Berlin, a place that always smelled of polished brass, oil, and the faint, sweet scent of time itself. My name is Jessica, but everyone calls me Jessie. I was sixteen that summer of 1939, and the air was thick with something I couldn't yet name, though the adults called it Angst. It was a quiet, creeping tension that made the streetlights seem a little dimmer and the neighbors' smiles a little more strained. The last four weeks before the war were a strange kind of purgatory, a time when our family pretended that everything was normal, even as the world around us crumbled. It had started years ago, with the boycotts and the rhetoric, but that summer, the fear had found its way into our apartment, whispering from the cracks in the walls. I remember my mother, Leah, baking her famous apple cake, the scent of cinnamon and warm fruit filling our kitchen, a defiant act of normalcy against the growing darkness. We tried to talk like we used to, about Benjamin's new soccer ball, about Rachel's beautiful singing voice, about the endless scrapes and bruises of little Daniel and Sarah. But our words felt hollow, like echoes in a cavernous space. My father, with his quiet, thoughtful eyes, would sit by the radio late into the night, the German news reports an unintelligible roar to my younger siblings and me, but a source of silent dread for my parents. I would often join him, sitting in the quiet, and sometimes he would simply pat my hand, a gesture of reassurance that felt more like a goodbye.
"We have to be strong, Jessie," he would say, his voice a soft rasp. "For them." He would nod his head toward the bedrooms where my siblings slept, their soft breathing a stark contrast to the heavy silence of the living room. "The world is changing, and we must change with it, but we cannot lose ourselves." I didn't fully understand what he meant then, only that the weight of our Jewish heritage had become an anchor dragging us down in a city that no longer wanted us. I remembered watching my friend, Greta, a girl I had known since we were small children, cross the street to avoid me one afternoon. My heart had clenched, a tight, painful knot in my chest. "Greta?" I had called out, my voice small and uncertain. She had looked at me for a split second, her eyes wide with a fear that wasn't for me, but of me, and then she hurried away, her head down. It was a small betrayal, but it felt like a crack in the foundation of my world, and I began to understand that the hatred wasn't just in the newspapers; it was in the eyes of the people we had once called friends. The happy world of my childhood was a distant, faded memory, replaced by a new reality of whispers and sidelong glances. The warmth of our family home, once a sanctuary, now felt like a fragile shell protecting us from a storm that was growing stronger every day.
