My Family for the War (13 page)

It wasn’t easy to free myself of my crowd of admirers and sneak off to the Underground unnoticed during the break. But when I turned the corner onto the next street I held on
to my straw hat and started running, filled with irrepressible anticipation of adventure and destiny.

With my heart pounding, I asked for a ticket, and rode on a narrow, rumbling subway car into a dark hole. As soon as we reached daylight again, surrounded by honking cars and scurrying pedestrians, I felt entirely at home, as if I were back in Berlin! I quickly found the street sign I was looking for. I hurried along the street, my eyes raised to read the signs on each storefront, and stood as if paralyzed for at least two minutes in the middle of the sidewalk when I actually did see the words I had been longing for. Café Vienna.

A soft, sweet music began to play in my mind and accompanied me through the door, which opened with the tinkling of a bell and revealed a surprise: The music was real! An actual violinist and a live piano player were playing in the middle of the hustle and bustle, tables crowded close together, men in hats and women in clouds of perfume, plates with huge pieces of Sacher torte and Black Forest cake, cups topped with towering crowns of whipped cream. The scent of chocolate, coffee, cigarettes, and baking overcame me, and if I hadn’t been in a trance of shock and delight already, the smell alone would have instantly robbed me of my senses.

It wasn’t until an older man pulled out a chair at his table and looked at me with a questioning expression that I noticed that they could see me too, and I wasn’t the only living creature in the midst of a fairy tale. “Na, what may I offer you?” he asked with a wink. “Hot chocolate, perhaps? With lots of cream?”

That’s when I realized that all these people spoke German! A weak “Ohhh…” was all I could manage, but it
was answer enough. Less than a minute later, one of the fragrant cups floated down from the waitress’s tray and was set before me. I dipped my spoon in the whipped cream, licked and sipped and closed my eyes as I savored the last drops.

“Playing hooky, are you?” The gentleman grinned.

I leaned back in my chair and ran my tongue along every surface in my mouth, hoping to find a little bit more whipped cream. “Only from school,” I said. “I’ll be back in time and my host family won’t notice.”

“Your host family?”

“My parents are still in Berlin. I have to bring them over. That’s why I’m here.” I suddenly had the feeling I was doing something wrong, something illegal. I bent over forward. “Someone told me that people here could help me,” I whispered.

“Ach,” murmured the older man.

“I came with one of the kindertransports,” I added, to avoid any silence. “From Berlin. My mother is a cook and a seamstress—now. My father is a lawyer, but he can also work as a butler or gardener.”

The elderly man leaned back, where several newspapers hung from a coatrack under the coats and hats. He unhooked one, laid it out on the table in front of us, and leafed through it. “Can you read English?” he asked.

“A little,” I answered hopefully.

After a while he found what he was looking for and pushed the newspaper over toward me, without saying a word. It was half a page, at least. I read and read; there was no end. And the older gentleman just sat there the entire time and watched me.

Who will sponsor Jewish sisters from a good family, 14 and 16 years old?

Unmarried Jewish woman, 34, teacher, seeking any household position, gardening, child care, in exchange for room and board.

Urgent! Married couple, Jewish, mid-40s, academics, still in Vienna, seeking any kind of work.

Who will make it possible for a young man, 22, to emigrate to England…

And on and on and on.

When I had finished reading, I didn’t have to ask anything else. “Those are notices that land on English breakfast tables every morning,” said the older man. “I’m sorry I had to show them to you, but I think it’s better if you know what you’re dealing with.”

“But,” I started, but my voice faded. My hand lifted in an almost accusing gesture that took in the room, the piano player, the violinist, the fancy cakes, all the people at the tables. I stood up. Suddenly I was filled with so much rage that I just wanted to get out. It was as if I could see directly into the rooms of the people who had placed the announcements, people who were trapped, like my parents and Bekka’s parents, like Aunt Ruth and Uncle Eric, and waited desperately for help.

“Go to the Jewish Refugee Committee,” said the man. “To the Red Cross. To the church. To the prime minister. Knock on the doors of the biggest houses, maybe someone there needs help. But you should speak good English if you do that. You have to make a very good impression; they’ll judge your family by what they see of you. You know,” he said, suddenly smiling, “I think you might just manage it.”

“Thank you for the hot chocolate,” I muttered.

“Come by again! I’m Professor Julius Schueler, and you’ll always find me at this table at about this time of day.”

Back through the streets. It seemed to take all my energy to set one foot in front of the other. Had I been unfair to the old professor? I turned on my heels and ran back. Professor Schueler was just paying and putting on his coat. He smiled when he saw me.

“The addresses,” I panted, “of the Red Cross. Of the prime minister. Do you have them?”

“Of course,” he said calmly. “We all do.”

“Mum says you’re working really hard at learning English,” Gary said. We sat by my window and searched the dark night sky for the first three stars, which meant the end of Shabbat. “She’s very impressed by your progress.”

“And you?” I asked sassily.

“Me? I have great hopes! Now we only have to look up every third word. Soon it will be a real pleasure to have a conversation with you!”

“Do you want to know a secret?” I asked. “I wrote to the prime minister this week.”

“You wrote… you mean Mr. Chamberlain?”

Now he was amazed! “Yes, that’s his name,” I answered with satisfaction. “He should help me get visas for my parents. But don’t tell anyone!”

Gary said, “I have a secret too. And this you really can’t tell anyone else, otherwise there’ll be a disaster. My parents think I’m going to the university this summer. But I’m not going. I’m taking the entrance exam for the Royal Navy.”

I looked at him questioningly. He reached for one of the little model ships on the shelf next to the desk. “If they take me, then I’ll be a soldier on a ship. If there’s a war, I want to fight Hitler. He should pay for everything he’s done to the Jews.” His face took on a hard look.

“War?” I repeated, shocked. There it was again, that word that had already been mentioned in Mrs. Collins’s office.

“Yes, don’t you know? This week the Germans marched into Czechoslovakia. First Austria, then Czechoslovakia, and what will be next? Poland, maybe? Holland? Belgium? Jews live everywhere over there. The world will pull together and help them. Soon they won’t have any choice. And then there will be war.”

I was speechless. I had never thought of it that way. I had always thought of war as something terrible, frightening, something my father didn’t want to talk about even twenty years later. But what Gary said made me see it in an entirely different light. Suddenly I could see the whole world before me, setting itself into motion to help the Jews. Little black troops marched like ants from every direction over a big, round globe like the one that had stood in Papa’s office and met in Germany, until there was nothing visible but a united, determined, seething mass that suffocated Hitler beneath it.

And then we could all go back: Professor Schueler, Thomas and me, Walter Glücklich and the Seydenstickers. My father wouldn’t have to work as a butler and my mother wouldn’t have to be a cook. We would get our apartment back and no one, no one, would have to be afraid of a knocking at the door in the night.

A thought raced through my mind: Why would all these
countries that didn’t want to take in Jews who were in desperate need come to our aid?

But just as quickly it occurred to me that if they conquered Hitler, they wouldn’t have to take us in. They wouldn’t even have to be inconvenienced by all our letters and emigration petitions anymore, because we could just stay in Germany! It was best for everyone that Hitler disappear. Of course they would help us.

And Gary, my brother Gary, would be part of it!

“One, two, three!” he counted, pointing to the stars that all of a sudden blinked from the heavens. “Let’s go! Time for the havdalah!”

I already knew that I played a not unimportant role in the havdalah ceremony that marked the end of Shabbat. As the youngest child in the family, I held the candle with a certain pride as the blessing was said over it. And just as the Sabbath had begun with the greeting “Shabbat shalom,” I knew the words used to wish each other a good week as it ended: “Shavua tov!” I had the feeling I was going to have a special need for that blessing in the coming week. On Monday, right after the lunch break at school, I wanted to start knocking on doors and asking about positions for my parents.

I was glad when Gary leaned over and whispered something in my ear that immediately distracted me: “There’s another secret!”

“What?” I whispered eagerly, stealing a glance at his parents.

Gary placed a finger on his lips and pulled me up the stairs to his room. On the way he pulled a small book from the living room bookshelves. When he opened it, I looked
at the countless Hebrew characters, bewildered. “This is a Haggadah, the Pessach ritual,” he explained. “Passover is celebrated about the same time of year that you celebrate Easter, because it’s the ritual that Jesus conducted the night before his death.”

“Jesus?” I repeated. “What does Jesus have to do with a Jewish holiday?”

Now it was Gary’s turn to be dumbfounded. “What else should he have celebrated, as a Jewish man?” I was thunderstruck. “Do you mean you don’t know that Jesus was Jewish?” Gary asked. “He was a rabbi from Galilea and did a lot of good things. We Jews just don’t believe that he’s the Messiah we’re waiting for.”

All I could do was silently shake my head. I couldn’t believe it. Jesus, a Jew! Even my religion teacher in Berlin surely didn’t know that, otherwise he would have mentioned it at some point! I’d heard often enough that the Jews had killed Jesus, but never that he had been one of them,
of us.
“You mean he did all these things that you do?” I asked excitedly. “And what’s this Hagga thing?” I asked eagerly.

“With this Hagga thing you’ll learn your part for the Seder. You have exactly two weeks.”

“For what?”

He grinned. “For a huge surprise. Your first official solo in Hebrew!”

Chapter 8

I listened for my letter as it fell through the slot, slid down, and landed in the big red mailbox with a soft thud. It had taken me a whole week to write. The letters to the prime minister, the Refugee Committee, the Red Cross, and the Anglican Church asking for help for my parents practically wrote themselves, but the first letter to Mamu since she told me about the situation with Bekka turned out to be really hard. What I put in the mailbox must have been the seventh or eighth version, and it had so many pages that I had to use double the usual postage. And still, as soon as the envelope disappeared through the letter slot, I had the feeling that I’d made yet another mistake.

The first two pages consisted of a glowing, enthusiastic description of my life in London: how comfortable my room was, that I looked forward to school every morning, got to wear a uniform, and was practically the teacher’s right hand; that in England, Jews were not only allowed to go to the movies, but the Shepards actually owned a movie theater called the Elysee,
and
had equipment to set
up a portable theater too! I had even thought to slip in a word of English here and there, as if I was already starting to forget German.

But the part that I hoped would get under Mamu’s skin the most were the pages about my host mother.