Read My Family for the War Online
Authors: Anne C. Voorhoeve
My Family for the War
My Family
for the
war
DIAL BOOKS
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Published by The Penguin Group
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First published in the United States 2012
by Dial Books
Originally published in Germany 2007
by Ravensburger Buchverlag under the title
Liverpool Street
Edited and published in the English language by arrangement with Ravensburger Buchverlag GmbH
Text copyright © 2007 by Anne C. Voorhoeve
English translation copyright © 2012 by Tammi Reichel
The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut (Goethe-Institut
) which is funded by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
All rights reserved
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Book design by Nancy R. Leo-Kelly
Text set in Carré Noir
Printed in the U.S.A.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Voorhoeve, Anne C.
[Liverpool Street . English]
My family for the war / by Anne C. Voorhoeve; translated by Tammi Reichel.
p. cm.
Summary:
Before the start of World War II, ten-year-old Ziska Mangold, who has Jewish ancestors but has been raised as a Protestant, is taken out of Nazi Germany on one of the Kindertransport trains, to live in London with a Jewish family, where she learns about Judaism and endures the hardships of war while attempting to keep in touch with her parents, who are trying to survive in Holland.
EISBN: 9781101575215
1. World War, 1939–1945—England—Juvenile fiction. [1. World War, 1939–1945— England—Fiction. 2. Identity—Fiction. 3. Jews—England—Fiction. 4. Refugees—Fiction. 5. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Fiction. 6. Great Britain—History—George VI, 1936–1952—Fiction.] I. Reichel, Tammi. II. Title.
PZ7.V944My 2012 [Fic]—dc22 2011009350
For my mother
Table of Contents
Book One:
Survival Plan 1938–1939
Book Three:
Returning Home 1941–1945
Book One
Survival Plan
1938–1939
Chapter 1
I would never find another friend like Rebekka Liebich. She crouched on the narrow windowsill, one hand holding tight to the frame, and held the other hand stretched out in front of her, as if that would somehow shorten the distance of almost five feet between her and the trunk of the birch tree. I stood in the courtyard three floors below and would have liked to close my eyes, but I couldn’t even manage that. I stared up at her, hypnotized.
In a few seconds I would witness my best friend plunging to her death. I could already imagine what my mother would say about that. The beating that Richard and his gang threatened to give Bekka and me if they got hold of us again suddenly seemed harmless compared to what I had coming when Mamu got her hands on me.
My anxiety grew. Bekka was not someone who left things to chance, especially not her survival. She had only climbed up onto the windowsill after she had made sure she could jump five and a half feet from a squat.
I managed to get a little farther than that, at least in the
sand pit. But I would have crouched on the windowsill like I was glued there. Ten wild horses couldn’t get me to jump into the birch tree! I knew it, and Bekka knew it too. She had offered to go first.
If she falls, I won’t have to jump!
I thought. Ashamed, I put my hand over my eyes for a moment, as if to shield them from the sun. But on that gray September day in 1938, the sun hadn’t even made an appearance.
Bekka rocked gently and took her left hand off the window frame. By then, my heart was pounding so loudly that I heard buzzing in my ears, and for a few seconds I actually thought the approaching drone in the air was the bursting of my own fear-filled heart. Bekka just held tight again, impatiently, and waited.
The airplane moved away, and I saw the small black swastika that clung to its wing like a spider.
Now! Something else flew right over my head: small, with long blond braids, and so quick that it was over in the blink of an eye. A noise, rustling, twigs and dry yellow leaves rained down on me, and there was Bekka, triumphantly perched in the branches of the birch. Perfect!
Oh, help
, I thought.
Now it’s my turn!
A window flew open on the second floor. “Have you lost your minds entirely?” Mrs. Bergmann screeched. I had never been so happy to see the old nag hanging out of her kitchen window. “Franziska Mangold and her worthless friend! Running away won’t help, I saw you!”
Bekka clambered down from the tree as quick as a squirrel. We knew every little branch on this tree, which would save my life just a few weeks later. Well, almost. In any case,
everything would have been different if Bekka hadn’t jumped into the birch tree that day.
“Damned Jewish brats!” Mrs. Bergmann’s deafening voice bounced off all four walls of the apartment buildings surrounding the courtyard. “I’m calling the police! They think they can just jump into our beautiful tree!” I heard other windows opening. The word
Jewish,
especially when it was shouted, was a sure way to attract attention.
Breathless, Bekka landed on the ground right in front of me. We took off.
“Ziska, wait a minute!” Bekka panted behind me. But I didn’t stop until we had taken cover behind the wall of the cemetery. I was the fastest runner, always had been, even in the first grade at my old school. That school had been “Jew-free” since summer, and Monika Bär had taken my place. She won the gold medal in the race, even though I had crossed the finish line first. They couldn’t let a Jew win.
“Jew-free” meant that Rebekka Liebich, Ruben Seydensticker, and I, the three Jewish kids in our class, had to get up an hour earlier in the morning and make the long trip to the Jewish school in Charlottenburg. Our former principal was given a commendation and got his picture in the newspaper. We found that rather unfair; after all, we were the ones who had to make our way through half of Berlin twice a day to keep our previous school free of Jews, not him.
“It’s just temporary,” said Papa.
I didn’t tell him that apart from the long trip to school I was actually very happy about the change. In the Jewish school we were left in peace. No one spilled ink on our
notebooks or forced us to play “Out with the Jews” during recess, a popular dice game that could also be played with live people. Ruben, especially, with his sidelocks, was a favorite when it came to taunting and beating. The fact that he always knew the right answers didn’t help either. Last year the teacher completely ignored him, even when Ruben was the only student who raised his hand. The teacher was more interested in measuring Ruben’s long, narrow skull in a lesson about race, to demonstrate the superior anatomy of Aryan children. Bekka and I had made ourselves small and inconspicuous in the last row, even though we both knew that our ordinary skulls weren’t in any danger, since they would have ruined the teacher’s beloved theory.