Authors: Lila Perl
Lilli's Quest (7 page)
The thresher drivers have now subdued and halted the runaway horse. But it is too late to right the badly off-balance thresher. It overturns with a hideous thud and an enormous clanging. At the same time a great cheer goes up. Lilli opens her eyes. Karl is safe. She rushes away to the privacy of the hostel kitchen, shaking with terror and weeping with relief.
* * *
Several months later, in December 1941, a world-shaking event that will alter the outcome of World War II takes place, and the United States enters the battle to defeat Hitler. All of England is jubilant. Uncle Herman writes that in the new year, he hopes to be able to bring Lilli to America.
The future, however, still appears dreamy and vague to Lilli. It is only when her uncle writes that papers are being drawn up and that she will sail by merchant ship from Liverpool in the summer of 1942 that she begins to panic. The sea voyage will be dangerous, as German submarines prowl the waters of the Atlantic. But Lilli is more distraught at the thought of leaving her good friends at the hostel. And she will never see Karl again. They have become as close as sister and brother as they have shared the confidences of the lost.
On the day Lilli leaves, there are teary goodbyes. “Give our love to America!” the hostelers shout as she is driven off in an Army lorry, with her land army uniform and a few personal belongings. “Give me your address in America,” yells Karl. “I promise to write. If you will.”
My name is Lilli Frankfurter. I am nineteen years old, and a sophomore at one of the well-regarded women's colleges, known as the Seven Sisters, in the northeastern United States. It is 1946 and World War II has ended, leaving behind a trail of horror stories, death, and human debris. I want desperately to go back to Europe to search for my lost family, so I've been taking journalism courses. I'm thinking that maybe one day I can get a job as a foreign correspondent!
Dr. Barbara Bagby, my journalism professor, tells me bluntly that I'm “aiming high, especially for a woman.” I don't think she's a very good spokesperson for a women's college. She maintains a neutered, austere appearance: tight lips, wire-rimmed eyeglasses, and straight lemony-yellow hair in an unflattering Dutch-boy cut. In her unemotional, nasal voice, she reminds me that I'm not Ernest Hemingway or any of the other great writers and foreign correspondents who are now swarming all over the ravaged continent and filing reports in American magazines and newspapers. Still, my unenthusiastic
mentor makes a suggestion: “Write me something, let's say in the form of a memoir or a journal. Let's see if you can bring a recent experience to life. Why don't you tell me what it was really like to come to America, after growing up in Nazi Germany and wartime England?”
At first, I'm not sure I want to write about the years since 1942, when I arrived in America during the thick of the war. Back then, I was homesick for a past that was a mixture of deep family love and unbearable loss. I also wasn't very nice to my American relatives and hosts, who were to give me everything I now have. It wasn't their fault that they looked upon me like a visitor from another planet. Because of my mysterious past in a savage world, I wasn't an ordinary person; I was a specimen. The Americans didn't know how to learn about me, so they probed me from all angles, like a meteorite that had fallen to earth, and asked questions that aroused too many bad memories.
I'm going to start by writing this in rough form to work out all the tangles that may be too personal for a finished piece. I'll begin with my arrival and then the shock of meeting that awful child, that noisy chatterbox with the hoarse demanding voice whose name was Isabel.
I spent most of the ghastly sea voyage in my bunk on that creaking and clanking merchant ship, seasick and tearful. We docked somewhere in New Jersey. I never saw the famed Statue of Liberty or the New York City skyline.
The Frankfurters, Uncle Herman and Aunt Harriette, met me full of apologies and worries, and could not have been more solicitous. I had hoped that my uncle, being Papa's older brother, would somehow resemble him and bring flickering images of him back to me. But this was not the case. My uncle was full-faced and balding, pleasant, but on the quiet side. His mind seemed to be somewhere else, taken up perhaps with his business and finance operations. He had emigrated from Germany in his university years and seemed, as I would later observe, a typical American male. He had only the slightest remaining trace of a foreign accent.
Aunt Harriette, on the other hand, was something else entirely. She was lively and outgoing, in personality and appearance: a short, full-breasted woman with narrow hips and elegant legs, dressed in a white-linen summer suit with a colorful scarf. Her hair was a rich, carroty red that matched her lipstick and her nail polish. Her eyes were ringed with liner, black kohl. Glittering gold jewelry adorned her bosom, her ears, and her wrists. I couldn't help liking her, with her rapid speech and rapid enthusiasms. “We'll shop and get you an entire new wardrobe,” she said after we had arrived at the enormous wood-and-stone house in Westchester, an upscale New York City suburb. We were sorting through my pathetic land army belongings. “I can't believe you even brought your rubber Wellington boots!” she exclaimed. We had
all worn Wellies on the farm, as there was mud everywhere. (I had long ago regretfully given up the beautiful fallen-apart leather boots that Grossmutter Bayer had bought me at the Kaufhaus.)
“Mind if we toss these?” Aunt Harriette asked with a twinkle. “I know where I can get you a pair of really magnificent leather hiking boots.”
We were sitting in the upstairs bedroom that Aunt Harriette had redecorated for me in white wicker, flowered chintz, and crisp organdy. The room resembled the very garden that it looked down upon, which was a riot of colorful blooms and neatly trimmed shrubs. It would have been impossible to visualize such a room in Germany, even in the most prosperous of homes, where the fashion for bedrooms was dark furniture and sedate wallpaper. The whiteness and the frilliness made me think of
schlag
âwhipped creamâtoo much of which could be a digestive embarrassment.
Speaking of digestion, dinner at my aunt and uncle's home was in the “small” dining room, and was served by a friendly maid of long-standing whose name was Maggie. Even with the wartime rationing that had started to take place in America, there appeared to be no shortage of anything. For just the three of us (my aunt and uncle had no children), there was an abundant roast, tender and juicy, the likes of which I had never tasted. Dessert was homemade apple pie. I kept thinking of my
hostel friends, eating baked beans on toast, to say nothing of the starving refugees and emaciated concentration camp victims all over Europe. Why couldn't Helga and Elspeth and Mutti have been given the chance to emigrate too? Why hadn't Papa pressed earlier and harder for his brother to help us come to America? Perhaps he'd been too proud; maybe he hadn't seen clearly enough what was coming with the rise of Hitler.
Despite their kindness, it amazed me how little my aunt and uncle asked me about my life in Germany and England. They seemed to be satisfied with my description of the farm hostel as “a cross between an army camp and a boarding school,” and they accepted my loose description of the Rathbones' poultry farm without further inquiry. Perhaps they just didn't know what questions to ask. More than likely, they simply couldn't have imagined the sleeping loft that I shared with small scurrying creatures, or the frozen chamber pots and vile outhouse, draped with spider webs.
In any case, I volunteered no information beyond the basics. Was I ashamed or embarrassed by my experiences? I think neither. I was simply angry, angry that Papa had surely died and that the others, if not hidden away, were almost certainly doomed to share his fate.
“We have got to get you out into the country air,” Aunt Harriette kept insisting during my first weeks in
Westchester, which seemed country-like enough to me, with its broad greenery and woodsy areas for pleasant strolls. “Besides,” she explained, “you need to have a friend. She's a little younger than you are, but bright as a penny. I think you two are going to get along famously.” A week or so later, I found myself being driven in the back seat of Uncle Herman's shiny, new Cadillac to what Aunt Harriette referred to as a “modest summer hotel in the Catskills.”
She sounded almost apologetic as she explained from the front seat that Shady Pines was a simple, family-run place. It was there that I would meet my new friend, Isabel Brandt, who was vacationing with her parents. “SallyâIsabel's motherâand I have been dear friends since our early school days, long before I met your uncle. We are truly like sisters.” The word
sisters
was always upsetting to me, especially now, when I was convinced I was living the life that Helga should have had. I had, of course, always written to my uncle as Helga, and my new family did not know of my false identity.
“Remember, Helga dear,” said my aunt a few hours later, as we crunched off the paved road onto one of dirt and stones, with deep wheel ruts and a hump in the center, “this place is really rustic. The accommodations are . . . well, a bit crude. You'll be sharing a room with Isabel, and the toilet and shower facilities are outside. I hope that will be all right.”
Aunt Harriette escorted me to the room I was to share with Isabel. “She's twelve,” my aunt advised me, “and still has a bit of baby fat, but she's really very grown up. You'll find she's a typical American girl.”
I had no way, of course, of knowing what that might be.
Aunt Harriette apologized again for the room's unpainted wood-plank walls and the shared bureau and closet, and left me to unpack. One of the two beds was undoubtedly Isabel's, as she had left her clothes and even her sneakers on top of the covers. So, I placed my things on the other one.
I was still bending over my suitcase when the “typical American girl” dashed into the room, unfastened the top of her bathing suit, gave me a horrified look, and announced, “You're in the wrong room. This one is mine.”
When I told her, “I am Helga,” she seemed to have no idea what I was talking about and, black eyes full of hostility, dashed off without explanation. So perhaps I was in the wrong room. I closed my suitcase, sat down on the bed, and waited.
Matters were soon sorted out. Apparently, no one had told Isabel that I was going to be her roommate, or anything at all about me. Aunt Harriette apologized, a bit vaguely, for Isabel's rudeness, saying her family had not expected me to arrive so early in the day, etc. We would all meet, and I'd be introduced at dinner that evening.
* * *
I'd been told that the meal would be served in the dining room of the hotel's main building, and that Shady Pines was known for its excellent kosher Jewish cuisine. As the clothes Aunt Harriette had bought me so far were on the casual side, I felt I should dress properly, so I put on Mutti's flowered-chiffon dress. It was, after all, the dress she had meant for me to wear in America.
The dining room was big and bright and noisy, with a hundred or more people seated at large round tables, tearing away at home-baked rolls, smearing them with chicken fat and chopped liver. The Friday night meal was going to contain meat, so no dairy products such as butter or milk would be served. I met Isabel's parents, both of whom seemed a little uncomfortable about the earlier mix-up. Her father wore dark-rimmed eyeglasses and had a small mustache. Her mother kept a vulture-like watch on Isabel, who was seated next to me. I had the feeling Isabel was being punished for having been so abrupt with me earlier, which wasn't completely her fault. Why had she been kept in the dark about my arrival?
Very soon, the food began to arrive. A suave waiter with a wrinkled, chalky-white face and black patent-leather hair swirled his tray of soups before me and set down a brimming bowl without spilling a drop. He called me a “beauty” and asked Isabel who I was. She told him I was “Helga from Germany,” and whispered
to me that he was Harry, the head waiter at the hotel for years, and nothing but an old flirt. Sure enough, when he'd finished serving the table, he blew me a kiss at me with two fingers.
Were all Americans so bold, I wondered? Another waiter, much youngerâor maybe he was only a busboyâhad been staring at me ever since I sat down.
My other embarrassing problem was the huge amount of food I was expected to eat. After a few tablespoons of the rich, golden-colored soup, I managed a chicken wing and some peas and carrots. For dessert there were baked apples and sponge cake and tea. By that time, word must have gotten around the dining room that there was a Jewish refugee girl from Germany at the Brandt-Frankfurter table. People who had already finished their meal came up to us, shaking their heads, and appraising me keenly. “Such a pretty girl,” said one woman, who looked as though she ate well, “but too thin. You'll have to fatten her up, Sally.” The woman was addressing Isabel's mother. But Aunt Harriette answered assertively that Americans ate too much. “Helga's been living on a wartime diet for a long time now. Our food is far too rich for her at present.”
More Shady Pines' guests crowded around the table. There was such a hubbub, I could hardly make out what they were asking. One man, cigar in mouth, did catch my attention. “Did you ever see Hitler, that bum?” he called
out in a booming voice. “Enough!” a woman, probably his wife, commanded. “Can't you see the poor child is exhausted? Let her be.” Little by little, the inquirers and curiosity seekers drifted away. I was terribly confused. What did I want, questions or no questions? Why did I find these well-meaning Americans so disturbing? How was I ever going to adjust to life in the United States? At last, we all rose from the table. I looked to my left, where Isabel had been sitting. But she was gone. I had no idea when she'd made her escape.
The next morning, after a night of muddled and dreary dreams, I woke about two hours before breakfast and got ready to explore the countryside. This was something I had enjoyed so much while living at the hostel in England, after the restrictions of my years in Germany.
I was lacing up my hiking boots as quietly as possible when Isabel stirred and demanded sleepily to know where I was going. True, it was barely light out. When I told her I would be gone a couple of hours and asked if she'd like to accompany me, she groaned and dove under the covers.
I had learned all the old paths and trails in the English countryside around the hostel, and I had a pretty good eye for direction, so that I seldom got lost. There was something rougher and more challenging, however, in the tangling American “wilderness,” even though it
was not at all uninhabited, but dotted with small farms and homesteads, most of them in shabby condition, their yards filled with broken-down automobiles and rusted machinery. Unlike England, there seemed to be no fences, hedgerows, or other indications of boundaries. So it was hard to know whether or not I was trespassing. One moment I'd be making my way through dense forest, with heavy undergrowth, that seemed to be miles away from human habitation, while my next few steps would lead me to the front door of one of the neglected-looking hovels.
I had just emerged from a dark copse of woods. There was no farmhouse or other dwelling in sight. But my ears were assaulted with the loud and vicious barking of a dog. I thought of backing into the forest and climbing a tree. But the animal found me out before I had the chance.