'The Thought of High Windows': Memory of Evil

rhyme. Esther watches as Walter is beaten up and driven away in a truck, his eyes burning "hotter than the sun." Esther thus betrays Walter with her silence, and then with her words. "'What do you take me for?'" she says when the soldier asks if she "'know[s] the Jew." Three weeks later, Esther receives a postcard, forwarded many times from the chateau, from Walter. In a devastating reminder of her betrayal, it reads, "'No one has ever been as kind to me as you.'"

The Tower Window: Remembering

Esther knows that Walter will certainly die in a concentration camp. Yet she lives because of Walter's love and self-sacrifice, not an act of cowardice. Not long after Walter's capture, Esther visits a Christian church. Accustomed to the chatter and the warmth of synagogues, Esther is struck by the frigid stateliness of the church. "It's so different from our little synagogue at home...What am I doing here?" When she climbs the stairs to the church tower--this dark tower with a beam of light (radiating hope? or God?) is sparely illustrated on the book's dust jacket--she imagines she is a kite from childhood, pulling up to the window frame. She always jumped through them to survive, but this time her intentions are unclear--perhaps even to herself. At the last minute a stranger pulls her to safety. "'Listen, things may seem terrible now,' he says, 'but one day the war will be over and you'll build a new life.'"

Esther realizes that she is talking to a Nazi soldier and she spits in his face, taunting him to shoot her. Yet in the moment when anger is just registering in the soldier's face, Esther realizes that death would be the worst thing to happen. The soldier says that she was not meant to die, and helps her down the stairs. He says, "'Most of us just want to get back to our families...finish this stupid, wasteful war. And forget.'" In an uneasy parallel to Sad Eyes' practical philosophy, the soldier thinks the extermination of Jews is wrong because it is not prudent; it is wasteful. The soldier is a curious figure to appear near the end of the novel. If Esther was attempting suicide, it is troubling that an avuncular Nazi soldier should save her life, even though he does so out of no redeemable quality but a utilitarian brand of ethics. Is the reader to

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