Their life was simple and comfortable in Nuremberg. Janet was happy there too. And when the baby was born in March 1946, everything went smoothly. They named the baby Alexander, and Merrie forgave him his gender and announced that he was her baby too. She helped Anna take care of him whenever she wasn’t in school, and carried him around everywhere, much to the chubby little boy’s delight. He took his first steps for Merrie, and he chortled whenever he saw her walk into a room, and squealed with delight.
Robert’s parents had come to visit and see the baby as soon as he was born, and were thrilled with their new grandson. Bill accompanied his son to the courtroom for most of the week, and was deeply moved by the trials and the translation of the testimony. The horrors the witnesses spoke of were beyond imagining, and Robert would have found it overwhelming at times if he didn’t take great satisfaction in being part of the team bringing the Nazi monsters to justice, to punish them for their crimes. It was deeply rewarding, and his father could understand why he stayed there. He had been in Germany for over a year by then, and there was no way of estimating how long it would take. But Bill assured Robert that the managing partner was continuing to run the firm admirably, and the partnership was thriving.
Robert was shocked at one of his father’s suggestions. “You should let Merrie go to court with you sometime. This is an important piece of history. It would be good for her to see it.” Robert could tell that he meant it, but in his mind it was out of the question, given the testimony they were hearing, the atrocities being recounted, and the occasionally graphic film footage and photographs they were shown, which his father wasn’t aware of.
“You can’t be serious,” he said, horrified. “Dad, she speaks German. She’ll know what they’re saying.” Bill had used the tribunal’s very efficient translation system to help him understand the witnesses and had had tears in his eyes several times.
“All the better,” Bill said with a look of determination. “And of course I’m serious. The entire world should know what happened. We can’t ever let them forget it.”
“She’s ten years old.” A lot of the testimony had been medical, as the victims described the experiments that had been performed on them, and the ghoulish surgeries. They had tried twenty-three Nazi physicians.
“If we don’t want this to happen again, we have to shout it from the rooftops.” He was pleased to note that there were more than three hundred correspondents from twenty-three countries covering the war crimes trials, and more than four hundred visitors daily.
“I don’t want my ten-year-old child to know what those monsters were capable of,” Robert said quietly.
“Why not? If you want her to make a difference in the world one day, she has to know what she’s changing it from.”
“I wish you’d stop trying to use her for your crusades,” Robert said, irritated, as he spoke with feeling to his father. The trials were important, but not suitable for a child, in his opinion.
“She’ll have her own crusades one day, or at least I hope she will,” her grandfather said firmly. “The world is changing, and by the time she’s older, women should have a voice in those changes. Why not hers?”
“That’s not what Janet and I want for her,” Robert reminded him, looking worried. “We want to shield her from the cruelties of the world. She doesn’t need to ride into battle. Women don’t need the hard life you think is so worthwhile to make a contribution to the world. She should get married and have children, and run a nice home for her husband, the way her mother does for me.” He didn’t consider what he said demeaning. It sounded right to him.
“Meredith is capable of more than that,” his father said stubbornly. “Janet is like your mother. They’re natural-born homemakers, and all they want is to focus on their families, an occasional fashion show at the Junior League, and their bridge game. Is that really what you want for Meredith, Robert? She’s too bright for that. But you can at least influence her now, and open her eyes to the many things she can do in the world when she gets older.”
“That wouldn’t be a happy life for her,” Robert said sternly. “If you get her wound up about a legal career, or righting the injustices in the world, and turn her into Joan of Arc or some kind of freedom fighter, she’ll never have a husband and kids. That’s a choice some women make, but not the life her mother and I want for her. It would be a huge sacrifice for her to make, and I won’t let that happen,” he warned his father. “You’re a man, you can do anything you want. She can’t.” It was an eternal disagreement between them, and he didn’t want his father influencing his daughter and pushing her into decisions she would pay too high a price for in the end. His father thought it was worth it. Robert didn’t.
“You’re behind the times,” Bill growled at him. “The world has already changed more than you think. Women have a strong voice now and getting stronger.”
“Not as much as you think. When we go home, she’ll go to college like her mother, and get married. Don’t turn her into a freak.”
“You have a child with a bright mind and an adventuresome spirit,” Bill said. “Don’t turn her into a housewife with an ironing board in one hand and a baby on her hip. The world needs brave women, not just brave men, Robert. Look what you’re doing here, bringing war criminals to justice.” He was proud of his son for being part of history, and he wanted his granddaughter to follow in her father’s footsteps one day, despite his objections or fears for her.
“I don’t have to give up my wife and children to do what I’m engaged in,” Robert reminded him. “If you want a revolutionary in the family, wait a few years and focus on your grandson. Don’t fill Merrie’s head with your ideas.”
But he already had. Meredith had told Anna several times that she wanted to be a lawyer one day and fight for people who had been mistreated, like the Jewish people in Germany. The young German housekeeper looked embarrassed when she said it, and told her that no one had known how terribly they were treated in the camps, but when Meredith told her father, he said they had known more than they admitted, when they saw women and children and entire families cast out of their homes and dragged away or loaded into cattle cars and shipped east to the camps. Robert said that no one wanted to take responsibility for the horrors the Allies had exposed to the world, which were heartbreaking. It was why he was in Nuremberg. The atrocities couldn’t be denied anymore, and the criminals had to be brought to justice, and were now.
They spent four years in Germany, and Meredith spoke German perfectly, and loved her school and her friends and her life there. She was devastated when the war trials finally concluded and her parents told her they were moving back to New York. She looked and sounded like a German child by then. She was thirteen years old, and Alex was three and bilingual too. And even Janet had learned to speak enough German to get by in the shops and talk to people she met. Robert spoke it creditably, after hearing four years of testimony. They had condemned many of the accused criminals to prison sentences, and the judges had imposed the death penalty on a considerable number of the defendants, and they had been executed. But Robert was aware that, whatever they did to the Nazis, it would never make up for the number of people they had maimed, killed, and destroyed, the families they had wiped out, and the lives they had ruined forever. There was no way to undo the evil they had committed, or bring back the millions they had killed in the death camps. Their crimes were too hideous to believe. And Meredith had grown up hearing about them and understanding more than she probably should for a young girl her age.