The World That We Knew

It is early springtime, 1941, in Berlin. Nazis have begun an aggressive campaign to deport the prominent Jewish families still in the city. Nazi thugs killed Hanni Kohn’s husband, a respected doctor, just months ago outside the hospital. Through her grief, Hanni is determined to ensure the safety of her 12-year-old daughter, Lea, a shy, precocious, and beautiful child with luxurious blonde hair. In addition, Hanni cares for her bedridden mother, a Russian Jewish immigrant who tells Lea stories of the old country about bands of wolves that roamed the countryside determined to do what they needed to do to survive the fierce winters. The wolves ruled the forests, her grandmother tells her. “Be a wolf,” she advises (11). One night, a Nazi soldier, attracted by Lea’s blonde hair, nearly rapes her. When the soldier pushes Lea into an alley, the girl sees perched on a rooftop across the street the lone mysterious figure of Azriel, the Angel of Death. Hanni intervenes to save Lea by stabbing the soldier with scissors from the dressmaker’s shop where she works. Shaken by the encounter, Lea tearfully cuts off her blonde hair. Hanni resolves to get Lea out of Berlin and to the relative safety of occupied Paris where her cousins, the Lévis, live.