Nellie looks up from her drawing. “We’re not going to the beach today,” she announces.
“Phew,” Stephie replies.
She helps herself to a piece of paper and a pencil and begins to draw a girl’s face, with large eyes and curly hair. She spends a long time on the mouth, trying to make a thin, arched Cupid’s bow. She has to erase it several times before she’s satisfied. The girl looks glum. Pretty and sorrowful. A little like Evi, her best friend back in Vienna.
Elsa admires Stephie’s drawing. She’s been busy drawing princesses with long blond hair and pink ball gowns. John is too little to do anything other than scribble what looks to Stephie like a jumble of lines and spirals.
Stephie walks around to the other side of the table to look over Nellie’s shoulder. She’s drawn a man and a woman, both on their knees on the sidewalk. Standing over them is a man in a uniform. He’s got a pistol in one hand, and is lashing at the couple. Behind them is a shop window, on which someone has written, in big red letters: JEWS.
Stephie recognizes the scene in Nellie’s drawing. She was there, too, one day just after the Germans invaded Vienna, nearly a year and a half ago.
The girls had been on their way home from the playground. Outside the furrier’s shop, where their mother bought her fur coats, they saw the furrier and his wife on their knees, scouring the sidewalk with scrub brushes. A man in uniform was guarding them, a pistol in his hand. They were surrounded by a crowd. No one stepped in to help the elderly couple. On the contrary, people were laughing and mocking them. Someone had written JEW in yard-high red letters across their shop window. Stephie took Nellie by the hand and ran home.