In November 1940, when Max Vandenburg arrived in the kitchen of 33 Himmel Street, he was twenty-four
years old. His clothes seemed to weigh him down, and his tiredness was such that an itch could break him in
two. He stood shaking and shaken in the doorway.
“Do you still play the accordion?”
Of course, the question was really, “Will you still help me?”
Liesel’s papa walked to the front door and opened it. Cautiously, he looked outside, each way, and returned.
The verdict was “nothing.”
Max Vandenburg, the Jew, closed his eyes and drooped a little further into safety. The very idea of it was
ludicrous, but he accepted it nonetheless.
Hans checked that the curtains were properly closed. Not a crack could be showing. As he did so, Max could no
longer bear it. He crouched down and clasped his hands.
The darkness stroked him.
His fingers smelled of suitcase, metal, Mein Kampf, and survival.
It was only when he lifted his head that the dim light from the hallway reached his eyes. He noticed the
pajamaed girl, standing there, in full view.
“Papa?”
Max stood up, like a struck match. The darkness swelled now, around him.
“Everything’s fine, Liesel,” Papa said. “Go back to bed.”
She lingered a moment before her feet dragged from behind. When she stopped and stole one last look at the
foreigner in the kitchen, she could decipher the outline of a book on the table.
“Don’t be afraid,” she heard Papa whisper. “She’s a good girl.”
For the next hour, the good girl lay wide awake in bed, listening to the quiet fumbling of sentences in the
kitchen.
One wild card was yet to be played.Max Vandenburg was born in 1916.
He grew up in Stuttgart.
When he was younger, he grew to love nothing more than a good fistfight.
He had his first bout when he was eleven years old and skinny as a whittled broom handle.
Wenzel Gruber.
That’s who he fought.
He had a smart mouth, that Gruber kid, and wire-curly hair. The local playground demanded that they fight, and
neither boy was about to argue.
They fought like champions.
For a minute.
Just when it was getting interesting, both boys were hauled away by their collars. A watchful parent.
A trickle of blood was dripping from Max’s mouth.
He tasted it, and it tasted good.
Not many people who came from his neighborhood were fighters, and if they were, they didn’t do it with their
fists. In those days, they said the Jews preferred to simply stand and take things. Take the abuse quietly and then
work their way back to the top. Obviously, every Jew is not the same.
He was nearly two years old when his father died, shot to pieces on a grassy hill.
When he was nine, his mother was completely broke. She sold the music studio that doubled as their apartment
and they moved to his uncle’s house. There he grew up with six cousins who battered, annoyed, and loved him.
Fighting with the oldest one, Isaac, was the training ground for his fist fighting. He was trounced almost every
night.
At thirteen, tragedy struck again when his uncle died.
As percentages would suggest, his uncle was not a hothead like Max. He was the type of person who worked
quietly away for very little reward. He kept to himself and sacrificed everything for his family—and he died of
something growing in his stomach. Something akin to a poison bowling ball.
As is often the case, the family surrounded the bed and watched him capitulate.Somehow, between the sadness and loss, Max Vandenburg, who was now a teenager with hard hands,
blackened eyes, and a sore tooth, was also a little disappointed. Even disgruntled. As he watched his uncle sink
slowly into the bed, he decided that he would never allow himself to die like that.
The man’s face was so accepting.
So yellow and tranquil, despite the violent architecture of his skull—the endless jawline, stretching for miles;
the pop-up cheekbones; and the pothole eyes. So calm it made the boy want to ask something.
Where’s the fight? he wondered.
Where’s the will to hold on?
Of course, at thirteen, he was a little excessive in his harshness. He had not looked something like me in the
face. Not yet.
With the rest of them, he stood around the bed and watched the man die—a safe merge, from life to death. The
light in the window was gray and orange, the color of summer’s skin, and his uncle appeared relieved when his
breathing disappeared completely.
“When death captures me,” the boy vowed, “he will feel my fist on his face.”
Personally, I quite like that. Such stupid gallantry.
Yes.
I like that a lot.
From that moment on, he started to fight with greater regularity. A group of die-hard friends and enemies would
gather down at a small reserve on Steber Street, and they would fight in the dying light. Archetypal Germans,
the odd Jew, the boys from the east. It didn’t matter. There was nothing like a good fight to expel the teenage
energy. Even the enemies were an inch away from friendship.
He enjoyed the tight circles and the unknown.
The bittersweetness of uncertainty:
To win or to lose.
It was a feeling in the stomach that would be stirred around until he thought he could no longer tolerate it. The
only remedy was to move forward and throw punches. Max was not the type of boy to die thinking about it.
His favorite fight, now that he looked back, was Fight Number Five against a tall, tough, rangy kid named
Walter Kugler. They were fifteen. Walter had won all four of their previous encounters, but this time, Max
could feel something different. There was new blood in him—the blood of victory—and it had the capability to
both frighten and excite.
As always, there was a tight circle crowded around them. There was grubby ground. There were smiles
practically wrapped around the onlooking faces. Money was clutched in filthy fingers, and the calls and cries
were filled with such vitality that there was nothing else but this.God, there was such joy and fear there, such brilliant commotion.
The two fighters were clenched with the intensity of the moment, their faces loaded up with expression,
exaggerated with the stress of it. The wide-eyed concentration.
After a minute or so of testing each other out, they began moving closer and taking more risks. It was a street
fight after all, not an hour-long title fight. They didn’t have all day.
“Come on, Max!” one of his friends was calling out. There was no breath between any of the words. “Come on,
Maxi Taxi, you’ve got him now, you’ve got him, Jew boy, you’ve got him, you’ve got him!”
A small kid with soft tufts of hair, a beaten nose, and swampy eyes, Max was a good head shorter than his
opposition. His fighting style was utterly graceless, all bent over, nudging forward, throwing fast punches at the
face of Kugler. The other boy, clearly stronger and more skillful, remained upright, throwing jabs that
constantly landed on Max’s cheeks and chin.
Max kept coming.
Even with the heavy absorption of punches and punishment, he continued moving forward. Blood discolored
his lips. It would soon be dried across his teeth.
There was a great roar when he was knocked down. Money was almost exchanged.
Max stood up.
He was beaten down one more time before he changed tactics, luring Walter Kugler a little closer than he’d
wanted to come. Once he was there, Max was able to apply a short, sharp jab to his face. It stuck. Exactly on the
nose.
Kugler, suddenly blinded, shuffled back, and Max seized his chance. He followed him over to the right and
jabbed him once more and opened him up with a punch that reached into his ribs. The right hand that ended him
landed on his chin. Walter Kugler was on the ground, his blond hair peppered with dirt. His legs were parted in
a V. Tears like crystal floated down his skin, despite the fact that he was not crying. The tears had been bashed
out of him.
The circle counted.
They always counted, just in case. Voices and numbers.
The custom after a fight was that the loser would raise the hand of the victor. When Kugler finally stood up, he
walked sullenly to Max Vandenburg and lifted his arm into the air.
“Thanks,” Max told him.
Kugler proffered a warning. “Next time I kill you.”
Altogether, over the next few years, Max Vandenburg and Walter Kugler fought thirteen times. Walter was
always seeking revenge for that first victory Max took from him, and Max was looking to emulate his moment
of glory. In the end, the record stood at 10–3 for Walter.They fought each other until 1933, when they were seventeen. Grudging respect turned to genuine friendship,
and the urge to fight left them. Both held jobs until Max was sacked with the rest of the Jews at the Jedermann
Engineering Factory in ’35. That wasn’t long after the Nuremberg Laws came in, forbidding Jews to have
German citizenship and for Germans and Jews to intermarry.
“Jesus,” Walter said one evening, when they met on the small corner where they used to fight. “That was a time,
wasn’t it? There was none of this around.” He gave the star on Max’s sleeve a backhanded slap. “We could
never fight like that now.”
Max disagreed. “Yes we could. You can’t marry a Jew, but there’s no law against fighting one.”
Walter smiled. “There’s probably a law rewarding it—as long as you win.”
For the next few years, they saw each other sporadically at best. Max, with the rest of the Jews, was steadily
rejected and repeatedly trodden upon, while Walter disappeared inside his job. A printing firm.
If you’re the type who’s interested, yes, there were a few girls in those years. One named Tania, the other Hildi.
Neither of them lasted. There was no time, most likely due to the uncertainty and mounting pressure. Max
needed to scavenge for work. What could he offer those girls? By 1938, it was difficult to imagine that life
could get any harder.
Then came November 9. Kristallnacht. The night of broken glass.
It was the very incident that destroyed so many of his fellow Jews, but it proved to be Max Vandenburg’s
moment of escape. He was twenty-two.
Many Jewish establishments were being surgically smashed and looted when there was a clatter of knuckles on
the apartment door. With his aunt, his mother, his cousins, and their children, Max was crammed into the living
room.
“Aufmachen!”
The family watched each other. There was a great temptation to scatter into the other rooms, but apprehension is
the strangest thing. They couldn’t move.
Again. “Open up!”
Isaac stood and walked to the door. The wood was alive, still humming from the beating it had just been given.
He looked back at the faces naked with fear, turned the lock, and opened the door.
As expected, it was a Nazi. In uniform.
“Never.”
That was Max’s first response.
He clung to his mother’s hand and that of Sarah, the nearest of his cousins. “I won’t leave. If we all can’t go, I
don’t go, either.”
He was lying.
Amazing story of Max Vandenburg, a Jew in Germany at that time, Martha.