My Family for the War (37 page)

“I hope they’re only rumors too. But the fact is that there were Jewish soldiers among the Free French and Polish troops in Africa who had specific details. The Resistance has helped too many Jews make their way to freedom to not know what they’re saving them from.”

After a long pause Walter added, “The camps are spread over half of Europe. Germany, Austria, France, Belgium, Holland, Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, we know where they are. And another thing—can you explain to me why little children and old people are sent to labor camps?”

I didn’t hear anything else, and even his last words weren’t very clear, not because Walter had spoken too softly or one of them had noticed me, but because a strange buzzing in my ears began as soon as I heard “Holland.” Within seconds, I couldn’t hear at all, the walls around me began to sway, and I had the sensation I was lifting off the ground. I slid down the wall until I sat on the floor, and tried to focus on objects in the room until my vision cleared. I broke out in a cold sweat. It lasted maybe two minutes, but when Amanda came into her bedroom a little later I was still sitting there. She glanced at the open window and knew.

“I thought it was about Bekka,” I said as she knelt down in front of me without a word. “But it’s about all of them, isn’t it?”

“We don’t know, love.”

“But I want to know! I have to know! If what Walter said is right, then the whole world has to know about it, so that it stops!”

“You’re right. And even if it’s not true it has to be made public so that we know for certain. We can’t let up until we’ve found out what’s happening.”

“I’ve known for a long time that I’ll never see my mother again,” I muttered, as if calling up my deepest fear might lessen the horror.

Amanda replied, “As long as we don’t know anything concretely, there’s no reason to lose hope. It could be that the Red Cross doesn’t know where your mother is because she’s gone into hiding.”

“I have to talk with Walter,” I said. “He has to tell me everything he knows.”

If you ask, you’ll get an answer. That simple saying proved to be true in the following days, and once we started to ask questions, it wasn’t difficult to find answers. It wasn’t the great secret I had thought it was that Jews were being transported throughout half of Europe, it just wasn’t talked about in public. The author Thomas Mann, who gave radio addresses for German BBC listeners from his Californian exile, had already talked about mass murder of Polish Jews a year earlier. In Holland and France, where Walter’s information came from, roundups of Jews were a regular occurrence; in Amsterdam they were taken to the main railway station
in streetcars, right out in the open, where trains from the concentration camp at Westerbork awaited them. To single them out, Jews were forced to sew a yellow star onto their clothing.

But what happened to the people after that wasn’t clear. There were lots of different claims: forced labor in labor camps, resettlement in ghettos, even deportation to some country in the South Pacific. We heard of camps where the prisoners were left to their own devices until they succumbed to disease, starved to death, or committed suicide.

Other rumors said that entire families simply disappeared; they boarded a train but never arrived anywhere. There was talk of toxic gas. These rumors were so wild and unbelievable that many people we knew in the Jewish community didn’t want to talk about it at all. “We Jews shouldn’t make too much fuss,” people would say, and that Great Britain was already fighting against Germany—what more did we want them to do? We began to write letters to newspapers and members of the Houses of Parliament to draw attention to our questions. Response to our letters was limited. That summer the newspapers were full of grimly enthusiastic reports about the German collapse on the Eastern Front, and if anything was written about the situation of the Jews at all, it was generally preceded by the statement: “Jewish organizations report…” It sounded as if these things were only of concern to Jewish people, and no one but us had heard anything.

Once I got over my initial shock, all this information had a sobering effect on me. I weighed everything I heard, hoped that none of it was true, and reckoned with the worst, or
what I thought to be the worst at the time—hunger, sickness, mortal danger. I had been living with the loss of my mother for too long to think it impossible that she was dead. After all the fears I had overcome, I became calmer and more distanced, as if I was building armor to protect myself from that final bit of news.

The one thing I couldn’t do was relate all of that to Bekka. A train had saved me, and transported me to a new life. Where did Bekka’s train take her? I pushed the question far away, because it hurt too much. It was unthinkable that something had happened to her, the one who should have been here safely in my place.

Despite all the uncertainty, we celebrated Gary’s birthday, the twelfth of June, during Walter’s home leave. I had been dreading that day. Amanda had been slowly but surely improving in recent months, and I was afraid that milestone would set her back again. Helplessly I asked myself how to approach the day. Maybe it was best to just let it come and go.

Finally, I decided to be the first to get up that morning and to set the table nicely for breakfast—not too fancy, but enough to make it special. My foster parents’ reaction would show me what to do next.

Secretly I got a little bouquet of flowers and hid it in my room so I could take them apart and use them for decorations. My search for special foods wasn’t as successful; after four years at war, the stores simply didn’t have anything. There wasn’t any honey or sugar, there were no canned goods, no onions, no fruit. By sacrificing all my meat coupons I was able to get several beef sausages.

Amanda also got up earlier than usual, and barged in on my preparations just as I was taking apart my bouquet. “Oh, darn it!” I said, disappointed and a little embarrassed, which wasn’t exactly the greeting she was used to. To my relief, she laughed when she saw what I was up to, and let me look into the bag she held in her hand.

The bag contained three small packages. I must have looked a little apprehensive when Amanda placed them on the table.

“Frances, twenty-three years ago today my son was born. This will always be a day of celebration for me, and if I can’t give Gary presents anymore, then you’ll just get something instead,” Amanda explained. It was the first time in ten months that I’d heard her say Gary’s name out loud. She held out the smallest package to me. “Let me see if you like it.”

Inside the blue wrapping paper I found a little jewelry box. “I thought that might go well with your cross necklace,” Amanda said, looking at me expectantly.

I opened it—and resting on cotton was the most beautiful piece of jewelry I had ever seen. It was a tiny Star of David with a red-gold filigree band wound around the points. It was so delicate, I could hardly imagine that a human hand could create something so fine. It took my breath away.

Amanda was pleased by my reaction. “There’s an Indian goldsmith in Camden, one of Hazel’s uncles. When I told him who I wanted a gift for, he asked me to come back a week later. He made it just for you. The star is quite unusual, don’t you think?”

She stepped behind me, opened the clasp on my necklace, and added the star to the chain, which slid down to join my
cross. The light, loving touch on my neck reminded me of Mamu and the day we parted, when she had given me the necklace.

“Now I’m wearing both of my mothers around my neck!” I said, half joking, as we admired the perfect harmony of cross and star in front of the mirror.

“Frances, I thank you for this past year. For your love, your patience, your courage. Did you notice that you started calling me Mum when I was least there for you? Instead, you took care of me. I don’t think you have any idea how strong you are.”

Three days later the war continued for Walter: The Eighth Army landed in Sicily to join the Americans in opening a second front against the Germans. For a short time I managed not to think about what awaited him there, but then the weekly newsreels showed the first images of the invasion of Italy and I noted that love and worry don’t take orders.

Herr Glücklich, who was too modest to want visitors other than his son, died in a London hospital in July, alone. At the same time, Hamburg was being bombed and the city was engulfed in a firestorm. I didn’t tend to sympathize with the Germans, but when I saw pictures of burned, disfigured bodies of people who had died in an inescapable inferno, I felt sick to my stomach. For the first time it felt like something had spun out of control, that now even the good guys in this fight had stooped to a level that corrupted them, and from which nothing just and pure could come anymore.

Chapter 21

The longer the war lasted, the harder it became to imagine that it would ever end. People were sick of the air-raid cellars, the sirens, the mountains of rubble lining the streets. Almost three years after the Blitz, the Germans renewed their attacks on London—in retribution for Nuremburg, Munich, and Berlin, it was said—and even if they didn’t have nearly the same destructive force of the first air battles, their impact was devastating. Maybe the day would come when we wouldn’t know how to manage in not-wartime, how to sleep through the night, shop for food and clothing without points and coupons, how to plan for the future—or even what London had looked like before the blackout.

The weak lamp on my bicycle was the only light on the street that night. The streetlights had been dark for five years now, the curtains in the houses firmly shut. My eyes, long accustomed to finding their way at night, couldn’t remember it any other way. Not a bad quality for an air-raid messenger, I thought!

Carefree, I stretched out my legs and let the bike roll down
a small hill. Something darted across the street in front of me—a cat? The German bombers rarely had enough force for a second round of attacks, and as soon as I delivered my message to the office at the train station, I’d be able to go home.

The sudden dull rumble behind me startled me. Immediately I thought of a dud bomb, instinctively ducked my head under my steel helmet, and pedaled faster, but as I turned around I gasped: An enormous, shapeless shadow sixty yards behind me sank to the ground very slowly, almost in slow motion, and disappeared into the asphalt without a sound.

I stared and must have steered my bike quite a ways without looking forward. Although I immediately knew what I was dealing with, I couldn’t get it through my head that it was actually happening to me. In a few seconds I wouldn’t exist anymore! I didn’t feel fear, only surprise. A bright ball of light flared high into the sky and it was blindingly white, almost beautiful with its two shimmering violet and lavender circles in the middle. Then came the bang of the explosion, and with it a bloodcurdling rumbling and grumbling like a huge dog. Unbearable pain stretched between my ears like a tight rope, the world turned upside down, gray shadows spun around, then darkness.

But how pleasant it was to be dead! I observed how the black surrounding me gradually gave way to a bluish light. Something moved, maybe a face? Before I could recognize it, it was gone, a comfortable exhaustion overtook me, and I fought in vain to keep my eyes open. When I opened them a second time, the face bent over me through the bluish fog,
smiling, and my heart leaped. Mum! She had in fact kept her word and found me. Trusting her, I let my eyes fall shut again. We had arrived. Now nothing more could happen to us.

Opening and closing my eyes was like a game: Each time a little more was revealed. At first there was only a face, then the lips moved, and finally I started to understand words. My name, for example, and that I didn’t need to be afraid, everything was going to be okay. When I noticed that my voice had returned, I asked, “What happened?”

I was less concerned about myself than why Amanda was here too, but she only answered, “A parachute mine got you, sweetheart. You’ve been asleep for quite a while.” Then her voice cracked and she fought back tears, which shocked me; why would there be tears up here?

“Asleep? You mean we aren’t dead?”

“Heavens, no,” Amanda said with a shudder, and these two words spoiled everything. All at once I recognized that I was lying in a white bed surrounded by a curtain, and that the slightest movement sent shooting pains through my head and chest that until that very moment I hadn’t felt at all. At least as bad, though, was the sight of my left arm, which was covered with bruises and had a needle attached to a plastic tube sticking out of it!

Amanda finally told me the whole story. My eardrum had burst but was healed, I had broken several ribs and my skull, and what I had thought was several hours of sleep had actually been almost six weeks!

“Six weeks?” I gasped in disbelief. “Then it’s… ?”

“The end of March,” Amanda replied, and a muscle in her
face twitched. “But don’t worry, you’ll be perfectly okay! The doctor says you’re a miracle, and you’re getting a medal for bravery too.”

“I didn’t even deliver my message!”

Amanda laughed, pleased. I had almost forgotten what that sounded like. “So what? This country needs heroes, so be quiet and accept it!”