Beauty and the Beast

Itzig Süß

You and I had yet another memorable conversation at yet another completely absurd time: the day you gave me appropriate clothes to wear.
Anna later told me they belonged to your wife, who had packed them away when she grew tired of them and could afford to have new, more expensive ones made for her. But for now, I wasn't complaining. I would much rather prefer to wear dirndl dresses than dowdy white bathrobes and flimsy slippers.

"You look like a Jew," was the first thing you said to me when I walked out of the bathroom clad in a blue-themed dirndl. "Completely and utterly Jewish. Take it off."
I tried on a green one, a pink one, a burnt orange one—nothing seemed to please you. Not that I wanted to please you, anyway. I just didn't want to be met with "you look disgusting" or "you look Jewish" or "what a Czech whore" every time I came out of the bathroom wearing a new dress. At this point I could only be thankful that you allowed me some shred of privacy by letting me go to the bathroom and change instead of doing it where you could see me.
"You look disgusting in each and every one," you said when I came out wearing my original robe and slippers. "But I'll let you keep them anyway; I'm sick of seeing you in that white robe day and night."
I nodded silently and began to shove the dresses back in the box. Your eyes flashed with mounting anger.
"What's wrong with you? Hang them up."
I dragged the box over to the spacious wardrobe and began to randomly put things on hangers—a dress here, a pinafore there. You watched in begrudging silence from behind me, not saying a word until I was done.
"The word 'Jew' was an omnipresent word in my childhood," you said, when I had turned around. "It followed me into adolescence; into adulthood. It wasn't until I was appointed Deputy Reichsprotektor that the rumors were finally quelled. No one would dare dispute the racial purity of a man handpicked by the Fuhrer himself to be his representative in a conquered land of the Reich."
I looked at the threadbare toes of my slippers, my mouth suddenly dry. I didn't want to listen, although what you were saying piqued my interest. So you were suspected to be a Jew?
You had turned to look out the window moments before I raised my head to scrutinize your profile. I had never been raised with anti-Semitism; I had no idea what made a person more or less Jewish than the other. I couldn't see how you could be perceived as a Jew, given your virulent hatred of them and the ruthless policies you enacted against them as a result.
"My grandmother remarried after my grandfather died; she took the last name of the man she remarried, a man by the name of Süß." You rounded on me; I dropped my gaze to the floor. "Of course you wouldn't know this, but Süß is a rather generic Jewish surname." You heaved a melodramatic sigh. "As it so happened, my father once expelled a student from his conservatory of music. This young man decided to take revenge in the form of soiling our family name with rumors that we had Jewish heritage. We lived in a small town, and word spreads fast in small towns. Within days, my classmates at school began to call my brother and I 'Isidor'—'Isi' for short."
I was now thoroughly flabbergasted. No wonder you had cracked down on the Jews with such hatred and brutality. Somehow, this confession made me see you in a whole new light. It made me look at you with a glimmer of an emotion that I hadn't dared allow myself to feel for you, although in the moment I couldn't put my finger on what that emotion was exactly.
"I don't know why I'm telling you this," you said, throwing your hands up in disgust as you rose to your feet, your lips curled in disdain as you looked me up and down. "You'd never understand the disgrace of being called Jewish. For all I know you could have Jewish blood in your veins. I—"
"And what better person could you tell it to?" I heard someone say. It took me a couple seconds to realize that that someone was me.
You brindled, looking at me with a mixture of surprise and disgust. "I'm sorry...?"
"What greater assurance do you have that anything you say will never leave this room?" Satisfaction flooded me when I saw the glimmer of defeat in your eyes; you knew I was right.
"My father had the tendency to view the rumors about his Jewish ancestry with a certain degree of self-depreciation,"you continued. "He even went so far as to imitate Jewish behavior whenever guests came to our house." You snorted derisively. "My brother, on the other hand, threatened anyone who dared call him a Jew at school with a pocketknife."
"And you? What did you do?"
The look you gave me was one of pure hatred. I would later read that you only looked at me like that because of your inability to give a redeeming answer that would be the truth at the same time. The sad truth was that you simply did nothing when you were teased, as I would later learn many years later, as I poured over books about you and your life. You became known as a loner who tried to avoid confrontation with your tormentors as much as possible.
"It shouldn't matter to you what I did or didn't do." You spit each word out like they were pieces of gristle. "What good will that information do for you?"
I hunched my shoulders and looked at the toes of my slippers in feigned shame, when in fact I wanted nothing more than to leap at you and claw your eyes out. You sniffed disdainfully and went for the door, wrenching it open so hard and fast the hinges squealed in protest.
"I'll see you tonight," was the last thing you said before you shut the door.
Jew!! I wanted to shout after you. If anything, I wanted that to be the last thing I ever said to you. You filthy, dirty Jew!!!
But there was something else mixed with the outrage I felt, something reminiscent of triumph. I could only imagine what the resistance could do with the information you had so graciously provided me with, that you were suspected of being a Jew. I knew that if I wanted you to reveal more, I would need to reluctantly play the role of the submissive servant, the pliant and willing whore.
Yes, you would see me tonight, Reinhard. And hopefully, by playing the right cards at the right time, I would milk even more secrets out of you.