The Prosperous Thief (17 page)

And now she remembers every detail. It is night and they are on the water, a sea of water and much rougher than the river at home. She is lying on a bench rocking in the blackness, sick with leaving, sick with separation, sick with loneliness. The cabin is shrinking and Alice unable to breathe. She’s scared she’ll suffocate if she doesn’t find air, swings her legs to the floor, can’t find her balance, holds on to a pole, feels her way along the wall, loses the doorway. Think, she tells herself, think. And knowing a blind person would manage, she shuts her eyes and pretends she’s blind. Stumbling, groping and slithering with the ship’s swing she finds the door and lets herself out into a dimly lit passage. She sees stairs at one end, climbs them like a ladder, short legs, short arms and far too many layers of clothing, and finally to the deck and fresh air, but small relief because she’s left all her belongings below and what will happen if she can’t find her way back? She grabs the icy rail, her fingers stick. She pulls her cuffs over her hands, grasps the rail again and doesn’t let go.

She is appalled at the vastness of the ocean, the endless dark with knives of brightness, and an incessant slush slush slush that seems to grow louder and louder. She tightens her grip and rocks with the boat, rises with its rise, sinks with its fall. She could die out here and nobody but Willi would know, and she’d never see her parents again, just an endless black nothingness like the dreadful black sea in front of her. She’s terrified, but has to manage. So don’t look, she tells herself, and seals her eyelids tight.

It seems like forever before she opens her eyes again. Her head is tilted back, and above her is a veritable fairyland unlike anything she’s ever seen either in Krefeld or Düsseldorf or even in Berlin where, according to her mother, absolutely everything happens. Clouds of stars like fairy dust scatter the dome. She finds red Mars and brilliant Venus, and high in the sky a golden sliver of moon. And Alice wishes herself up there, just like in the storybook pictures, to sit on the golden arc with her feet dangling, a smile on her face, and safe. She unpeels her hands from the freezing rail and steps back from the boat’s edge into a protected corner of the deck. The last thing she remembers before falling asleep under a length of canvas is putting her parents up among the stars well away from danger.

When she awakens the lights of England are a foggy blur on the horizon. Alice leaves the deck and goes below. The escorts are already rousing the children. Lamps have been lit and Alice slips quietly into place. She feels as if she’s been on an adventure, like Jason and the Argonauts or Diana out hunting, and has returned alone but stronger. She’s not dead like her grandmother and she hasn’t been bashed like her father and soon she’ll be seven which is a lot bigger than six and her parents will come and everything will be all right. She recites it like a mantra:
my parents will come and
everything will be all right / my parents will come and everything will be
all right
. She collects her blanket, her tattered book, her knapsack and suitcase and waits with the other girls while the boat docks at Harwich.

It is still dark when they disembark, but Alice doesn’t care. She pushes out of line and goes in search of Willi. So many children and she can’t find him anywhere. In the end she resorts to Fraülein Rosa who promises she’ll be united with Willi once they arrive in London. Shortly afterwards they are herded onto another train, an English train this time with English posters high on the carriage walls. It is still dark, but as they travel down to London the sun rises. Alice tucks her legs beneath her, better to see this new country. It could be Mars, it could be Hades, it is certainly not home. She inserts a barrier in her brain; on one side is Krefeld, Düsseldorf, Berlin, the Friedmans, Mutti and Vati, and on the other this alien land called England.

Liverpool Station is feverish with people and noise. There are trolleys piled high with luggage and fresh farm produce, and everywhere ghastly animal carcasses and shrieking birds in cages. Alice tries not to look, has eyes only for Willi, but he is nowhere to be seen. Fraülein Rosa holds her firmly by the hand and now Alice is grateful to have her close. Through the noise and the crowds, through the bewildering bustle of a world so much bigger than a soon-to-be seven girl, they arrive at a huge cavernous room. And suddenly Willi is beside her. Alice’s relief is so great, the tears won’t hold back any longer.

She’s still clinging to Willi when, a few minutes later, Fraülein Rosa taps her on the shoulder to say goodbye. Alice gives her a long, warm hug, then watches her leave with the other escorts, all of whom will return to Germany and another transport.

Holding tightly to each other, she and Willi join the other
Kinder
in one area of the vast hall. In another area are the English people: the sponsors, relatives and strangers who have volunteered to look after the German children. In front, seated at a table, are the English officials, none in uniform, with their pens and piles of paper and booming English voices. The children are quiet, so too the guardians. Alice looks at them, trying to guess which of these strangers might be Hannah and Jonathon Moser. She makes sure her identification card is clearly visible so the Mosers can find her, then changes her mind just in case they don’t like the look of her and slip away before her name is called. She holds on to Willi with both hands now: if the Mosers take him then they’ll have to take her as well. He, too, is searching the crowd of English people; he, too, has covered his identification card.

‘I wouldn’t want that family in the corner,’ he whispers to her.

Alice looks across the room. The man is dressed like a storm-trooper; the woman also wears a uniform, and the boy is dressed in the brown shorts and shirt of the Hitler Youth. And while later they will identify these people as members of the scouting movement, for now they are afraid the Nazis are here too, and England no safer for Jews than Germany.

The officials start calling the children in alphabetical order. The names toll so slowly and Alice passes the time perusing the English people and choosing those she would like to be Hannah and Jonathon Moser. By the time Willi Friedman is called, all of Alice’s choices have been snapped up. Willi stands, he has to prise his fingers from hers, and an old couple with absolutely no chance of ever making Alice’s preferential list come forward. Both of them look so peculiar, the man with a huge unkempt beard, dressed in a jacket which resembles a rug, and the woman with a bizarre grass-green beret Alice’s mother wouldn’t be seen dead in. These can’t be the ones, Alice is saying to herself, surely these aren’t the ones. She hears an official ask:‘Professor and Mrs Moser?’ Then sees him check the papers, utter a few more words before handing Willi over.

They look better, younger, when they smile, Alice decides, but still a far cry from what she would have chosen. She watches them withdraw to the other side of the room, Mrs Moser with her arm linked through Willi’s, and the Professor carrying Willi’s knapsack and suitcase, watches as they keep walking – towards the exit, she suddenly realises, and is on her feet. They’re going to leave without her! She’s about to shout and run after them when they stop and turn and say something to Willi who points her out.Now they are smiling and waving; Mrs Moser in her green beret actually blows her a kiss. Alice sinks back in her chair and swallows her tears.

In the time before her name is called she concentrates on composing herself, not just for the next few minutes but for all the time she has to stay in England. She puts her mother’s voice inside her head, her mother saying that soon she and Vati will come for her and take her back to Germany, her mother’s voice telling her to be good and grown-up. When at last she is called she is quite calm. She weaves her way through the chairs to the front and walks the long strip across no-man’s-land to the table.

The worst was over, Alice told herself during that long, lonely walk. But she was wrong. Six years later she was still waiting for her parents to turn up at the door, then waiting for any news of them, and finally waiting for them not to be dead.That was the worst of times, and she’d only been a child. But she managed. Then last year when her husband died and she was again alone in the world, still she managed. Compared to what she had already experienced, being here at these London archives, with her orphaned status about to be verified fifty years after the fact, should be easy.

She checks her watch and at the same time a woman appears. It is the archivist. She introduces herself and apologises for being late, then guides Alice towards the office on the opposite side of the hall.

The archivist is a short, attractive woman aged anywhere between fifty and seventy. She is also very English with a nice collection of cut-glass vowels which issue from a perfectly symmetrical English mouth. Her hair is reddish and cropped, and her manner that of those no-nonsense English women with whom one could easily fall in love if one were so inclined, which Alice is not.

The archives area is small, cluttered and colourless. One wall is lined with squat grey filing cabinets, another is covered with shelves from floor to ceiling. All horizontal surfaces – shelves, tables, tops of the filing cabinets – are stacked with books and paper.

‘A little more colour in here and it’d be just like home,’ Alice says.

The archivist doesn’t laugh, doesn’t even smile, but neither is her face impassive; in fact, it is quite clear she is trying to fathom whether Alice is one of those rare Americans with an appreciation for irony. Alice smiles to allay any confusion and the archivist follows suit. Then it is down to business. The archivist clears the end of one of the tables and opens a file.

‘The fundamentals are as you outlined them in your letter,’ she begins.‘Your father escaped into Holland in 1941, and was trying to get your mother out of Germany when he ended up in Westerbork. He was transported from Westerbork to Bergen-Belsen mid-1944, included at the last minute to make up the numbers. He contracted typhus April 1945, and died in or near Belsen around the time the British entered the camp on the fifteenth of the month.’ She pauses for the information to settle, then continues in her blunt, pragmatic way.‘Your mother was one of a large group of Jews, mostly factory workers actually, who were rounded up in Berlin and deported on the twenty-seventh of February 1943. She died in Auschwitz, early November 1943.’ The archivist pauses again, but this time is watching Alice closely. ‘As you see, nothing to add to the fundamentals. But,’ another short pause, ‘we do have additional details about your mother’s death. New information which emerged when the archive was put on microfiche. Because of the additional cross-referencing,’ she explains.

The archivist sits back, she has said what needed to be said and now waits for Alice’s response. More information about her mother’s death, and Alice tries to read the woman’s face for clues. Surely if her mother died a hero, there’d be a smile, and if not a smile, a softening of expression. Or if there were further horrors to be revealed, the face would show a glimmer of concern. But there is nothing. Alice weighs it up. If there are horrors, they could be no worse than those she already knows, and if there are heroic acts, she wants to hear them.

She nods to the archivist, ‘Please,’ she says.‘Go ahead.’

The archivist lays out two sheets of paper on the table and starts to talk. She keeps her gaze on Alice, making no reference to the pages in front of her.

‘The additional information came to light only recently from a woman who was in the camp with your mother.’ Then, anticipating a possible query, adds, ‘Some survivors have kept silent for so long, it’s only when they recognise their time is running out they finally decide to speak. Of course, some take their knowledge to the grave.’ She shrugs that very particular Jewish shrug with the outspread hands, palms upwards, head cocked to the side, the quizzical eyebrows.

Information from a woman who was at Auschwitz with her mother and survived, and Alice knows with absolute certainty that what she is about to hear will show that if not for some quiver of fate her mother would have survived too. She already knows that with slightly altered circumstances her father might have lived. A different barracks, another workbench, a little less typhus or simply a little more luck and both her parents might have survived. Sitting here in this archive with the information about to spill, Alice is not sure she wants to know how close she came to not losing both mother and father.

It would still be possible to wind up this meeting, return to the hotel and tell Raphe there was nothing more to learn, still possible not to know how close she came to a normal childhood. And yet she stays in her seat in this grey room recalling stories of the strong, lively woman who was her mother, a woman who would never shy away from the truth, a woman of principles, according to Willi. He often told of the time when Renate first heard about Jews being forced to their hands and knees to clean public monuments with their mouths.

‘I’d refuse,’ Renate had said.

‘For your life you would lick,’ Dora had replied.

But Renate was adamant she wouldn’t.

In the end, according to the information in the archivist’s file, Renate Lewin had died by her principles. Long after she had given up saying things couldn’t get worse, long after she had dispensed with hope as the right arm of humiliation, Renate’s strength and determination had killed her. Marching off to work one day she fell out of line. A guard about half her age slammed his baton into her, causing her to stumble. She regained her balance and rejoined the line, but only briefly before she swerved again – not through physical weakness, according to the woman who was witness, but deliberate non-compliance.Again the guard beat her, but this time Renate held her ground. When she straightened up she placed herself firmly in his path.

The archivist now paused, leaning in closer and shaking her head. ‘I don’t think we’ll ever understand why – or when or how – some people reach their limit,’ she said. ‘I don’t even think we can ever know for sure what that limit actually is. It might be tolerance, or fear, or courage, or simply that too much of what one values is being destroyed. I really don’t know.’